Breaking News: Berachain Recovers $12.8 Million Lost in Balancer Exploit
The Berachain Foundation has confirmed the successful recovery of $12.8 million lost during the Balancer V2 exploit on November 3rd, in a rare instance of a full refund following one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) hacks of 2025. This remarkable recovery was made possible through the collaboration of a white hat hacker, who returned the assets after the chain’s emergency restart.
A summary of the key points is as follows:
- Berachain has recovered the entire $12.8 million lost to the Balancer exploit after pausing and restarting its network.
- The recovery was achieved through white hat collaboration with redistribution plans for affected users.
- The Balancer hack caused $128 million in cross-chain losses, raising new concerns about DeFi composability and audit restrictions.
Quick Action Restores Berachain Operations
The recovery was coordinated with a white hat hacker who cooperated to return the assets following the chain’s emergency restart. The foundation said it would consider generous appreciation and has begun removing key network functions such as HONEY minting and redemption. Berachain (BERA) temporarily halted all swaps, deposits, and withdrawals following the exploit to prevent further losses, citing caution as the underlying Balancer vulnerability was still under review.
Over 1,000 affected users will receive their funds back through a redistribution system that matches deposits to the original wallet addresses. In addition to Berachain, liquid stake platform StakeWise has also managed to recover around $20 million in stolen assets. The BERA token saw a 10% decline after the incident but recovered after the recovery announcement, showing renewed confidence in the project’s resilience.
Background Information on the Balancer Exploit
The November 3 Balancer exploit targeted the protocol’s V2 Composable Stable Pools and exploited a precision error in the “manageUserBalance” function to waste approximately $128 million in assets across multiple chains – including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain. More than half of the stolen funds were quickly converted into ETH. Balancer went into recovery mode and offered a 20% white hat bounty worth $25.6 million and asked the attacker to return the money within 48 hours.
Despite nine audits of its vault system, the incident reignited debates about the security limits of composable DeFi architectures. Berachain, a Cosmos-based Layer 1 network with proof-of-liquidity consensus, was affected by its balancer fork BEX. Its validators stopped the chain within hours and issued an emergency hard fork to freeze the attacker’s assets. They were later able to get the full amount back after negotiations with the MEV operator that was behind the exploit.
For more information, please visit the original article at https://crypto.news/berachain-recovers-12-8m-lost-balancer-exploit-2025/
