Balancer Hack: $129M in Crypto Assets Stolen, Berachain Validators Halt Chain for Hard Fork

Balancer Hack: DeFi protocol suffered a major exploit that drained more than $129 million in crypto assets. Multiple chains, including Ethereum, Base, and Berachain, are impacted by the hack that targeted V2 vaults and liquidity pools.

Balancer Hack: v2 Pools Exploit Led to $129M in Losses

Decentralized finance protocol Balancer confirmed an exploit impacting v2 pools on November 3. The engineering and security teams are investigating the exploit, with hackers actively converting liquid staking protocols’ native tokens (LST) into ETH in real-time.

PackShieldAlert reported a massive $129 million in crypto assets mostly linked to Ethereum were drained by hackers. The stolen crypto assets across multiple chains included WETH, osETH, wstETH, sfrxETH, and rsETH.

According to Spot On Chain data, Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Sonic, Polygon, and Berachain networks are impacted. Notably, a dormant whale address 0x009 just woke up after the exploit and withdrew $7.38 million worth of assets from Balancer.

The attack targeted Balancer’s V2 vaults and liquidity pools, exploiting a vulnerability in the smart contract. On-chain investigators highlighted a maliciously deployed contract that manipulated Vault calls during pool initialization.

Notably, improper authorization and callback handling enabled the hackers to bypass safeguards. This triggered unauthorized swaps or balance manipulations across interconnected pools, draining assets from multiple chains.

Bera Validators Halts Chain for Hard Fork

Bera Foundation revealed that validators have purposefully halted the Berachain network. The core team will perform an emergency hard fork to address Balancer V2-related exploits on the chain. The foundation added that the network will be live again after recovering all affected funds.

Smokey The Bera posted on X that Ethena team was contacted to disable bridging out of Bera, disabled lending markets and deposits for USDe, paused HONEY mints and redemption, and contacted CEXes to ensure that addresses are blacklisted.

BAL Token Price Tumbles

BAL token price tumbled over 10% in the past few hours, with the price currently trading at $0.897. The 24-hour low and high are $0.8977 and $1.02, respectively. Trading volume has increased by 56% amid the Balancer hack.

BERA token plunges 7%, with the price currently trading at $1.69. Trading volume increased by 93% in the past 24 hours. All liquid staking tokens such as LDO, JTO, RPL, among others, saw prices dropping amid the massive unstaking reaction by investors.

Meanwhile, Ethereum price also extended the intraday fall and tumbled over 4% in the past 24 hours. The price currently trading at $3,686, with a 24-hour low and high of $3,667 and $3,914, respectively.