What is AURA?
Aura Finance is a protocol built on top of the Ethereum-based Balancer system to provide maximum incentives to Balancer liquidity providers and BAL stakers (into veBAL) through social aggregation of BAL deposits and Aura’s native token.
For BAL stakers, Aura provides a seamless onboarding process to veBAL, by creating a tokenised wrapper token called auraBAL that represents the 80/20 BPT locked up for the maximum time in VotingEscrow (read more about what this means). This can be staked to receive existing rewards (BAL and bbaUSD revenue) from Balancer, in addition to Aura system revenue in the form of BAL(read more about the fees), and additional AURA. Users can trade their auraBAL back to BAL at any time.
For Liquidity providers, Aura abstracts complexity of depositing into the Balancer gauge system, providing a relatively smooth onboarding process to all Balancer gauge deposits. Aura allows depositors to achieve a possibly higher boost through the protocol owned veBAL while also accumulating additional AURA rewards.
The AURA token acts as a governance and incentivisation tool within the ecosystem. Locked AURA tokens will have governance rights in the system and will be able to vote using the protocol owned veBAL voting power as well as on internal proposals.