Summary
Recover unclaimed $BAL and $LDO incentives still sitting in Balancer’s pre-veBAL MerkleRedeem liquidity-mining contracts (~364k BAL and ~350k LDO respectively), and transfer recovered tokens to the BizDev Safe for redeployment as user incentives at BizDev’s discretion.
Background
Before veBAL, Balancer distributed liquidity-mining rewards via weekly MerkleRedeem contracts (erc20-redeemable): an owner published a merkle root every week; LPs claim with proofs. Unclaimed tokens remain in the contract indefinitely.
Two legacy Ethereum trees are in scope:
MerkleRedeemat0x6d19b2bF3A36A61530909Ae65445a906D98A2Fa8(BAL)MerkleRedeemat0x884226c9f7b7205f607922E0431419276a64CF8f(LDO)
These pre-date MerkleOrchard and veBAL. Residual orchard balances from the 2023 incident were handled separately via BIP-196. This BIP covers only the legacy MerkleRedeem contracts above.
Per BIP-882, the BizDev Safe (multisigs/balancer_bizdev) manages third-party incentive funds. Given these Merkle trees haven’t seen claims in years, their incentives will be better off being actively managed under the BD mandate.
Technical Specifications
Both trees can be reseeded with all existing incentives being attributed to the admin. It can then claim the full amount and forward that to the BD safe: [BIP-XXX] Recover unclaimed legacy LM MerkleRedeem funds to BizDev Safe by gosuto-inzasheru · Pull Request #2842 · balancer/multisig-ops · GitHub