Balancer Loses Over $120 Million in Hack
Balancer, one of the oldest decentralized exchanges, announced a hack on Monday. Attackers stole more than $120 million from the platform. Balancer said it could not stop the hack because it affected very old pools on the platform.
“Because these pools have been live onchain for several years, many were outside the pause window. Any pools that could be paused have been paused and are now in recovery mode,” Balancer said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Balancer clarified that only its V2 Composable Stable Pools were affected. Its V3 and other pools remain safe. According to the crypto firm GoPlus Security, the hacker exploited a rounding error in Balancer Vault’s swap calculations. This error let the attacker manipulate token prices using the batchSwap function.
Crypto Community Questions DeFi Security
The hack raised concerns about the safety of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. Many users asked how such a hack could happen despite Balancer’s security measures. Balancer said it had many audits and bug bounties to find problems early.
Crypto researcher Suhail Kakar noted, “Balancer went through 10+ audits, the vault was audited 3 separate times by different firms [and it] still got hacked.” Ryan Sean Adams from the Bankless podcast said, “Balancer hack is a setback for DeFi. If it can happen to Balancer it can happen to anything.”
Several blockchain projects acted quickly. Berachain validators halted their network. Sonic Labs added a freeze feature in their upcoming upgrade. This sparked debate about blockchain decentralization and immutability.
Meanwhile, liquid staking platform Stakewise recovered over $20 million of the stolen funds using its multisig wallet, as shared in a recent post.
Despite efforts to limit damage, the attacker continues converting stolen assets into Ether (ETH), according to blockchain tracker Lookonchain.
Crypto Market Reacts with Losses and Liquidations
The crypto market value fell 3.2% after news of the hack. Major coins like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP, BNB, and Solana (SOL) led the decline.
Derivatives market also saw heavy losses. Liquidations hit $1.23 billion, including $1.1 billion in long positions and $128.4 million in shorts. This data comes from Coinglass.
