Berachain recovers $12.8M after Balancer protocol hack
On Nov. 4, the Berachain Foundation reported it had recovered the entire $12.8 million drained from the BEX liquidity pools during the Balancer exploit, with assets returned to the foundation’s deployer wallet following an emergency restart.
The Cosmos-based Layer-1 halted its network within hours of detecting suspicious activity and executed an emergency hard fork that froze addresses linked to the attacker. Key functions, including HONEY minting and redemption, are being unpaused.
Trading on BEX-swaps, deposits and withdrawals-was paused while the underlying vulnerability was reviewed. More than 1,000 affected users are set to receive restitution through a redistribution program that matches recovered assets to original wallet addresses.
The incident traces back to a Nov. 3 attack on Balancer’s V2 Composable Stable Pools that exploited a precision error in the “manageUserBalance” function. Over $129 million was drained across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic and Berachain, with more than half of the assets quickly converted to ETH. Balancer entered recovery mode and offered a 20% white-hat bounty worth $25.6 million for the return of funds within 48 hours.
BERA fell about 10% during the disruption and rebounded after the recovery update. Separately, liquid staking platform StakeWise has recovered about $20 million taken in the same exploit.
As GNcrypto covered previously, Berachain halted block production and prepared an emergency hard fork in the days after the exploit. The update isolated compromised contracts, restricted addresses tied to the attack and enabled fund returns to a designated deployer wallet. Service resumed as validators, RPC providers and indexers rolled out the new client.
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