OG DeFi Giant Balancer Exploited for $128 Million: Forks Are Bleeding Out Now Too

Initial reports indicate that Balancer v2 pools have been affected by the exploit, while v3 remains safe.

OG DeFi platform Balancer has seen over $128 million exploited in various digital assets, with multiple blockchain security companies confirming the attack in real-time and new details emerging every hour.

In its latest update, blockchain security company PeckShield says declared it has now been confirmed that Balancer and its forks are under attack, with cumulative losses across chains of around $128.64 million already. Meanwhile, Mikko Ohtamaa, CEO and co-founder of Trading Strategy, revealed that the likely culprit is a faulty smart contract check.

Alchemy engineer Uttam Singh broke down the damage chain by chain and observed that at least 27 Balancer-like forks exist, according to DeFiLlama, implying that the contamination may not even be close to complete. That uncertainty is compounded by the fact that the operator address is still active and rolling out new contracts, creating modified ERC-20s and continually investigating.

Balancer’s only official statement to date reads,

“We are aware of a possible exploit affecting Balancer v2 pools. Our technical and security teams are investigating as a high priority. We will share verified updates and next steps as soon as we have more information.”

In September 2023, Balancer’s front-end suffered a DNS attack, caused by a social engineering breach at the domain registrar EuroDNS. Although the protocol did not confirm the losses, detective ZachXBT estimated that approximately $240,000 had been stolen.

Amid this chaos, analytics platform Lookonchain, marked a whale wallet 0x0090, which had been dormant for three years, suddenly woke up just after the exploit was confirmed and rushed to extract more than $6.5 million from Balancer.