MIM, BAL, DFX: the voted redemption rate trades at a discount

The contract paying out NUSD redemptions has delivered exactly 0.51 dollars for every unit burned: 13,362,651.83 USDC distributed across 924 transfers to 850 distinct addresses since September 17, 2026, and the ratio between the amount paid and the amount burned is exactly 0.51. That same rate, applied to the 27,188,163.49 NUSD still in circulation, promises 13,865,963.38 USDC, and the paying address held 4,206,951.83 USDC on Nov-5-2026: 30.34% of that promise (CleanSky calculation). Both statements are true simultaneously because a redemption rate is a price per unit and not a reserved fund. The comparator brings four metrics together —the written rate, the amount paid, the treasury, and who set the rate— across the five "broken dollar" redemptions of 2026, revealing a pattern: where the rate is set by a voted text, the market pays below (MIM at 92.35%, BAL at 74.92%); where it is set by an on-chain ratio, it pays above (DFX at 237.66%).

What does the Neutrl redemption contract actually pay?

On September 17, 2026, Neutrl opened a window to redeem its synthetic "dollar" NUSD at 0.51 USDC per unit. A contract reading on November 5 returns exactly 0.51: the same value as at the opening block. The contract was not paused, did not require a whitelist, and had its permission tree root set to zero, meaning anyone with NUSD could use it. The code is verified on Sourcify with an exact match since September 16.

What a contract claims to pay and what it actually pays may not coincide, but in this case, they do. Summing the 924 USDC outflows from the address funding the redemptions since the opening yields 13,362,651.83 USDC sent to 850 different recipients, with the last one recorded in the early hours of November 5. During the same period, the NUSD supply dropped from 53,389,441.59 to 27,188,163.49 units: 26,201,278.09 NUSD burned. The ratio is 0.509999999983 — the deviation is at the twelfth decimal place and stems from rounding the minimum unit of USDC, which has six decimals.

The math also checks out from the other side, and this matters because it distinguishes a fulfilled rate from a coincidental one. The paying address had 10,009,693.70 USDC when the window opened, received 7,559,909.96 USDC in two external inflows, and today holds 4,206,951.83. The identity —initial balance plus inflows minus outflows minus final balance— equals 0.00 to the exact cent, with no residue to attribute to anything else (CleanSky calculation). The origin of those two top-ups is not identified here: they are two transfers with no public source allowing them to be named. They are also the reason why the net drop in the treasury does not measure the rate paid: subtracting today's balance from the opening balance gives 5,802,741.86 USDC, which divided by the amount burned would result in 0.2215: a figure that looks like a rate but is a rate of nothing, as it ignores the two replenishments.

Why does Neutrl pay 0.51 to the cent with a treasury covering 30.34%?

Because the rate is a price per unit presented, and the treasury is what exists if all units are presented at once. The only treasury is the paying address: the contract's own balance in USDC and NUSD was zero on November 3, and its code exposes that address as the sole source of payment. Measured across four dates, the coverage fluctuates with the pace of redemptions and top-ups, while the rate remains fixed at 0.51.

That last column does not measure unpaid debt: the contract has paid every redemption presented to it. It measures what would remain if the 27.19 million NUSD in circulation were presented simultaneously. The coverage on October 15, at 15.66%, is the series low; what raised it to today's 30.34% was external capital, not a lower rate. The two top-ups account for 56.57% of everything the contract has paid (CleanSky calculation): more than half of the redemption has been funded by replenishments made after the opening. The window is scheduled to remain open until November 14, 2026, according to press coverage of the announcement; there is no indexed Neutrl page confirming that date.

How are the five open redemption rates of 2026 trading?

The prices below were read on Nov-5-2026 at 20:12 UTC, during a general market downturn —Bitcoin down 5.17%— which serves to timestamp the reading and nothing more: none of the figures in this table are explained by the day's session.

The Resolv rates are marked separately because the $1 and $0.50 per USR only appear in the press: neither the portal documentation nor the reconstruction of the incident that caused it set a figure. The case remains in the table for what it is: a window that closed on September 26, forty days before this reading, with the token trading at 6.4% of its senior tranche rate (the one that collects first).

Why do MIM and BAL trade below their voted rate while DFX trades above?

The fourth column is what orders the other three. For MIM, the $0.04 per unit is a figure written in the body of an Abracadabra wind-down proposal that was approved with 396,163,281 votes in favor, 0 against, and 2 voters. One of them contributed 296,115,861 votes, 74.7% of the total, from an address Etherscan labels as "Abracadabra.Money: MIM Treasury Wallet"; the other is the proposal's author. The voting space declares a quorum of 3,000,000,000 votes, and the proposal's subject matter remains below that threshold. What exists is a paragraph within the text itself that redefines the threshold at 309,046,858 votes, 30% of the 1,030,156,193.663 it declares in circulation: nothing was lowered in the space configuration; a different figure was simply declared in the body. At the SPELL price on November 3 ($0.0000761 according to DefiLlama), that self-declared quorum was worth about $23,500 (CleanSky calculation).

For BAL, the rate of $0.1579 per token is a measurement the proponent made on September 18, 2026, within the proposal for the orderly wind-down of the protocol, approved on September 29 with 99.19% of 17,226,164 BAL voted. The 25.08% discount currently traded by the market includes a portion that is purely calendar-based: the first payment is scheduled for late May 2027, 207 days from this reading. Discounting at the risk-free rate for that term (the six-month bill, at 4.25% on the U.S. Treasury daily curve for November 4, 2026) explains between 2.3 and 2.4 of the 25.08 points, depending on the discount convention. The other 22.7 points are not explained by the wait.

For DFX, no one wrote the rate. The token Drift issued to distribute the recovery from the Velocity incident is redeemable for the ratio between the USDT vault balance and the circulating DFX supply. The reading on November 5 gives $0.010418 per token, within the November 3 control band of 0.01041 to 0.01043. This is a figure that structurally can only go up: the vault receives contributions and never returns more than what is redeemed, and each redemption removes supply from the denominator. The series for that rate since October shows the same: it moves in the sixth decimal place, upward.

As of Nov-5-2026, the two redemption rates set by a voted text trade at a discount —Abracadabra's MIM at 92.35% of its $0.04 in the Curve MIM/3Crv pair and Balancer's BAL at 74.92% of its $0.1579 in the BAL/WETH pair— while the only one set by an on-chain ratio, Drift's DFX, trades at 237.66% of its $0.010418 on Meteora (DexScreener prices, CleanSky calculation). These are three observations from a single date and not a law: the market pays below when the rate is a sentence that someone can rewrite, leave unfunded, or pay in 2027, and above when it is a division between two balances that anyone can replicate. The condition under which this would cease to be true is in the final section.

In Neutrl's case, the rate is also a written number —the contract accepts any value from 0.0001 to 1.00 and whoever controls it can change it without a vote— and although it has not moved in seven weeks, NUSD had no pair with liquidity on DexScreener nor a price on the two DefiLlama services on Nov-5-2026, so there is nowhere to see if anyone is discounting it for that reason.

What liquidity do the pairs where MIM, BAL, and DFX trade have?

A discount percentage without the size of the order book that produces it is not comparable to another. The $0.03694 for MIM comes from the token's most liquid pair, which has $143,715.94 in liquidity and $49.28 in 24-hour volume. The $0.1183 for BAL comes from a pair with $4,419,516 in liquidity and $14,836.22 in volume: thirty times more book and three hundred times more volume. DFX sits in the middle for volume and at the bottom for book, with $37,551.83 in liquidity and $1,707.69 in daily volume.

The 7.65% discount for MIM and the 25.08% for BAL are, therefore, facts of different quality even if both are correct ratios. One step further down shows the extent of the problem: the second MIM pair by liquidity trades at $0.03658 with a $5,289 book, and the pair with the least book of all marks $0.03780 with $9.04 in liquidity. That last price exists, can be queried, and means nothing.

Why was the MIM price $0.068 on November 3 and $0.037 on November 5?

On November 5, three independent readings of the MIM price converge: $0.03694 on the Curve pair, $0.036939 on DefiLlama's price-by-contract-address service, and $0.036903 on its stablecoin service for the "Magic Internet Money" identifier. All three fit within 0.1%. On November 3, DefiLlama's stablecoin service and that same identifier served $0.068096, 84% higher, and today that value cannot be reproduced. The identifier queried was correct —the raw record from November 3 carries the token name next to the number— so what changed was the aggregator's price field.

The difference decides the sign of an entire row: at $0.068096, MIM would trade at 170.24% of its written rate, with a premium instead of a discount. With the three readings from November 5, it trades at 92.35%. The value is valid for the date it was read, and a comparison between two redemption rates only holds if both prices came from the same place on the same day.

Why can't Abracadabra's MIM coverage be calculated?

MIM coverage, which would be the most interesting row, is not calculated here, not for a lack of data but for an excess of denominators. There are three supply perimeters active at once: 174,877,889.88 MIM total supply from the Ethereum contract, 29,447,885.28 "circulating" according to DefiLlama, and "nearly 22 million dollars" outside protocol addresses according to the proposal body. The one that governs the payout is the third, and it can only be verified when the distribution list is published. Estimating coverage by choosing one of the three would be inventing it.

Another open question remains in the same case, and it is not necessarily a contradiction: the proposal declares actionable backing of around $900,000 to pay holders, while the address labeled as treasury held 1,343.13 WETH on November 3, approximately $3,073,528. Part of that balance may be borrower collateral, which is paid before token holders, but the text does not reconcile it. As of November 3, that address had not sent anything to a distribution contract: the MIM payout did not yet have an inspectable mechanism, unlike Neutrl's, whose 924 transfers are in plain sight.

What will be re-measured for Neutrl on Nov-14-2026 and what figure would change the reading?

The metric most worth watching until that date is the pace, and right now the pace has dried up. Between November 3 and 5, there were 8 new outflows worth 11,628.43 USDC and 22,800.85 NUSD were burned —the ratio over those two isolated days is again 0.51—, compared to the 26.2 million burned in the previous seven weeks. 27,188,163.49 NUSD remain in circulation, 50.92% of what existed when the window opened, with nine days to go. If the pace of these two days continues, approximately half of the original supply will remain at closing, and the question will shift to what happens to a "dollar" whose only declared exit expires.

Regarding the claims made here, four figures would change them:

1. If, upon re-reading the contract on November 14, the ratio between USDC out and NUSD burned deviates from 0.51 by more than 1%, the contract will have stopped paying what it claims.
2. If the treasury appears topped up to cover 100% of the promise on the circulating supply, we will have to say that the treasury follows the rate, and reading those two columns separately will no longer be valid.
3. If BAL or MIM close five consecutive days above their written rate, the pattern in the fourth column collapses. The period is counted based on pair readings —Curve for MIM, Balancer for BAL— since November 5: the aggregator's stablecoin series, the same one that served 0.068 on November 3, placed MIM above 0.04 from October 13 to 21, which is why it is not suitable for counting days.
4. If DFX closes five consecutive days below its ratio. It has not dropped below 2.38 times its rate in any of the four readings sealed since October 3.

The four columns can be reconstructed with public sources in an afternoon, and on November 14, they will be measured again against these four thresholds.

Sources and links: Verified NUSD redemption contract code on Sourcify (exact match, Sep-16-2026) · Transfers from the NUSD redemption paying address on Blockscout · NUSD supply series on DefiLlama · The Defiant on Neutrl opening the window at 51 cents · crypto.news on the same opening and contract reading · Abracadabra wind-down proposal on Snapshot (votes, quorum, and body) · Label and movements of the address that provided 74.7% of the votes, on Etherscan · MIM pairs on DexScreener (price, liquidity, and volume per pair) · DFX pairs on DexScreener (price, liquidity, and volume per pair) · BAL price on DefiLlama price service · BIP-928, orderly wind-down of Balancer and treasury distribution · Resolv recovery portal documentation · USR price on DefiLlama price service · CleanSky proprietary calculations based on the frozen extraction of Nov-5-2026.