Berachain prepares emergency hard fork after Balancer exploit

On Berachain, the impact centered on BEX, an exchange compatible with the Balancer V2 architecture. After confirming that the incident was linked to V2 logic, validators, in coordination with the team, halted block production to prepare an emergency protocol update.

The Berachain team stated it is urgently preparing a hard‑fork binary designed to isolate compromised contracts and restore correct account states.

Developers have also introduced restrictions on movements from addresses associated with the attack. These measures are intended to prevent renewed liquidity drainage before the restart. The network will remain paused until RPC providers, indexers, and ecosystem services install the new client version. The team describes this synchronization requirement as a condition for a safe restart.

Separately, Berachain reported a controlled return of some assets withdrawn during the incident. On the project’s official X account, the team said the funds are held by a participant identifying as a white‑hat actor and will be sent to a designated address controlled by the organization/deployer once the network is back online. To facilitate this, the fork enables transfers only to the specified return address.

For now, the team advises users to follow the project’s official channels and refrain from interacting with addresses flagged in connection with the incident until the restart is announced.