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Balancer V2 Exploit Drains Up to $128 Million Across Chains as Berachain Halts for Emergency Fork

Investigators say a flaw in V2 pools enabled cross-chain drains, with a full post‑mortem pending.

Overview

  • Balancer confirmed an exploit affecting V2 pools and said it is working with external security researchers to investigate and publish a post‑mortem.
  • Loss estimates range from roughly $100 million to about $128 million, with PeckShield and Cyvers citing the higher figure and Nansen tracking lower tallies as prices moved.
  • PeckShield reported around $99 million stolen on Ethereum and additional losses on Berachain (~$12.9M), Arbitrum (~$6.9M), Base (~$3.9M), Sonic (~$3.4M), Optimism (~$1.6M) and Polygon (~$232K).
  • Berachain validators deliberately halted the network and prepared an emergency hard fork in response, while integrators like Beefy paused Balancer‑linked products and Beets.fi began reviews.
  • Analysts say the attack leveraged a vulnerability in Balancer V2’s composable/vault design—variously described as faulty access control or precision/rounding issues—to drain assets such as WETH, osETH and wstETH, as BAL fell double digits and TVL dropped sharply.