TL;DR
After Balancer decided to sunset the veBAL system, Aura made the decision to thus fully wind down their protocol (AIP-78). The Aura locker was shut down, and therefore their (ve)BAL (meta) governance as well. Aura confirmed they will no longer participate in Balancer’s governance. As a result, it is proposed to formally exclude the Aura protocol from voting, and with that reduce the quorum accordingly.
Details
Historically, Aura was responsible for at least 60% (usually >75%) of the votes of every Snapshot proposal. Even though those votes were capped in terms of voting power (BIP-521), they did all count towards quorum. To roughly account for this, the current quorum of 10m BAL should be reduced by 50% to 5m BAL.
On top of that, as a formal measure, the voting power of the Aura VoterProxy (0xaF52695E1bB01A16D33D7194C28C42b10e0Dbec2) on Ethereum will be overwritten to zero in the balancer.eth voting power aggregator. This ensures that indeed Aura will not be able to participate in governance anymore, and that their underlying BAL will only become eligible for voting again once redeemed by individual users (assuming WindDownCoordinator is used as intended after unlocking on 2027-04-29).