Aura Finance, a protocol allowing BAL stakers and Balancer liquidity providers to boost their yield potential and governance power in an easy-to-use platform.

While Balancer will be Aura’s initial focus, the protocol has been designed to operate agnostically toward other vote-locked or vote-escrowed tokens. That’s to say, Aura can extend its influence beyond Balancer to other DeFi protocols over time. Details about Aura’s roadmap will be shared at a future date.

Contributors to Aura are numerous DeFi OGs, many of which were active in and familiar with the intricacies of the first era of ve tokens and the subsequent “wars” that followed. Contributors are abiding by a strict security policy that involves multiple audits.

AURA

A core tenet Aura is being built upon is that of community ownership. This will be accomplished through the AURA governance token.

Distribution will not be focused on private investors or advisors; in fact, no tokens are being distributed to insiders aside from protocol contributors. Instead, a sizeable portion of the initial circulating token supply has been allocated to the Balancer community, along with stakeholders in the broader DeFi space, via airdrops.

1.3% of the total AURA supply will be distributed to stakeholders and contributors to Balancer, inclusive of BAL holders, BAL BPT stakers, and veBAL holders.

Those that voted “yes” on the proposal to whitelist Aura for Balancer’s ‘votingescrow’ contracts have been awarded an additional allocation equal to 3x their voting power. Those that voted “no” or abstained from voting will receive no bonus but have still been allocated an airdrop based on the BAL locked up in veBAL.

An additional 2% has been allocated to the Balancer community treasury with a two-year vesting schedule.

”Power users” of DeFi have been allocated 1.2% of the total supply has been allocated to incentivize the involvement of a wide variety of addresses that have historically operated as active and aligned actors for other protocols:

• 1% of the total supply will be airdropped to vlCVX holders
• 0.2% of the total supply will be airdropped to holders of LobsterDAO NFTs

To further decentralize governance power and to incentivize wider participation, allocations across both categories have been power-scaled. (In layman, smaller holders will receive more AURA per BAL, vlCVX, or LobsterDAO NFT they hold relative to ‘whale’ holders).