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Balancer V2 Exploit Drains Up To $129 Million Across Six Chains

A flaw in Balancer V2 vault logic reused by forks triggered an emergency hard fork on Berachain.

Overview

  • Balancer confirmed its V2 Composable Stable Pools were exploited, placed pausable pools into recovery mode, and said V3 and other pool types were unaffected.
  • On-chain tallies put losses between $116 million and $129 million across Ethereum, Berachain, Arbitrum, Base, Sonic, Optimism, and Polygon, with large holdings in WETH, osETH, and wstETH.
  • Berachain validators purposefully halted the network and executed an emergency hard fork to address the Balancer V2–related drains.
  • Investigators report the exploiter is converting stolen staking derivatives into ETH as security firms track wallets and flows across bridges and mixers.
  • Balancer offered the attacker a 20% white-hat bounty, and StakeWise said roughly $19 million in osETH and $1.7 million in osGNO tied to the incident were recovered for users.