Berachain Recovers $12.8 Million Lost in Balancer V2 Exploit After Coordinated Effort With White-Hat Hacker
- Berachain fully recovered $12.8 million lost in the Balancer V2 exploit, showing strong security action.
- Over 1000 users will receive recovered funds through a verified redistribution system, ensuring fairness.
- The BERA token regained value after the recovery, reflecting renewed trust in the Berachain network.
The Berachain Foundation has recovered $12.8 million lost during the Balancer V2 exploit on November 3. This recovery marks one of the few full restitutions after a large decentralized finance breach in 2025.
The funds were returned to Berachain’s deployer wallet late on November 4, following coordination with a white-hat hacker. The attacker cooperated after the chain’s emergency restart, allowing all stolen assets from Berachain’s BEX pools to be retrieved.
Network Stabilization and User Compensation
After confirming the fund recovery, Berachain began restoring paused network functions. HONEY minting and redemption resumed, signaling operational stability. The foundation also plans to evaluate a bounty reward for the cooperating white-hat participant. Over 1,000 affected users will receive their recovered assets through a redistribution process. This system matches deposits with original wallet addresses to ensure accurate compensation.
Berachain had temporarily halted all swaps, deposits, and withdrawals immediately after the exploit. The pause prevented additional losses while teams reviewed the underlying Balancer vulnerability. The Balancer V2 exploit affected several platforms and networks, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain.
Wider Impact Across DeFi Platforms
The Balancer exploit drained around $128 million from its V2 Composable Stable Pools. The attackers exploited a precision error in the “manageUserBalance” function, which enabled them to manipulate balances and extract funds. More than half of the stolen assets were quickly converted into ETH across multiple networks.
In response, Balancer entered recovery mode and offered a $25.6 million, 20% bounty. The aim was to encourage the attacker to return the assets within 48 hours. Despite nine previous audits of its vault system, the incident renewed discussions on the security limits of composable DeFi structures.
StakeWise, a liquid staking platform, also reported the recovery of about $20 million from the same exploit. The combined recoveries highlight growing cooperation between DeFi projects and security researchers.
Market Reaction and Community Response
Berachain, a Cosmos-based Layer-1 network using proof-of-liquidity consensus, acted swiftly. Its validators halted the chain within hours and executed an emergency hard fork to freeze the stolen funds. Negotiations with the MEV operator behind the exploit later led to the full return of assets. Earlier this year, Berachain launched its layer-1 blockchain with a $1.17B BERA airdrop, innovative proof-of-liquidity, and major exchange listings.
Following the incident, the BERA token dropped by 10%. However, the token regained its value after news of the recovery, reflecting renewed confidence in Berachain’s resilience and governance.
