DeFi faces another crisis! Balancer hacked for over $116 million, losses continue to grow!

Around 3:48 PM on November 3rd, East 8th District time, on-chain data monitoring platforms suddenly detected that the treasury address of Balancer, a veteran DeFi protocol, had made an unusually large transfer.

According to Etherscan, multi-chain assets including 6,587 WETH (about $24.5 million), 6,851 osETH (about $26.9 million), and 4,260 wstETH (about $19.3 million) were transferred to an external wallet.

Several on-chain analysts believe this is likely a potential vulnerability exploit or unauthorized withdrawal, rather than a routine liquidity migration. Multiple blockchain analytics providers, including Nansen, have also flagged these transactions as suspicious.

According to monitoring by blockchain security firm PeckShield, the attack is ongoing across multiple chains including Ethereum.

As of around 4:48 PM East 8th District time, the attacker address (0x54B5…30d) executed another transaction by calling function 0x8a4f75d6, and Lookonchain confirmed that the total loss had exceeded $116 million.

Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder of Trading Strategy, pointed out that preliminary analysis indicates the root cause of the vulnerability is a flaw in the smart contract’s verification mechanism. Although not all versions of Balancer are affected, if the same vulnerability exists in older V2 forks, the total loss could rise further.

DeFi Security Remains a Challenge

This is not the first time Balancer has encountered security issues.

• As early as 2020, the protocol suffered a loss of about $500,000 when it failed to account for the special behavior of “transfer fee” tokens, allowing attackers to manipulate pool assets via flash loans.

• In August 2023, a vulnerability was discovered in Balancer V2’s Boosted Pool. Despite official warnings, an attack still occurred, resulting in a loss of about $1 million.

• In September of the same year, Balancer’s frontend domain was subject to a DNS hijack, causing users to lose nearly $240,000 after signing transactions on a phishing website.

Now, the latest round of attacks has once again brought DeFi security issues to the forefront. From contract design to frontend deployment, from liquidity pool logic to cross-chain asset management, the security challenges facing Balancer seem never to have been truly resolved.

Moreover, Balancer is itself a liquidity hub protocol, so when it has problems, it’s not just affected itself. Trapped LPs, dependent aggregators, asset pools, strategy vaults—all are impacted.

The DeFi world emphasizes “trustlessness,” but in the face of repeated vulnerability exploits, what can users truly trust? After five years of development, DeFi is no longer just a niche game for geeks, but financial infrastructure managing billions of dollars. Unfortunately, even leading protocols like Balancer still cannot escape the fate of old problems persisting while new ones arise.

Balancer Responds Two Hours Later

At 17:50 East 8th District time, about two hours after the incident, Balancer updated its official Twitter: a vulnerability potentially affecting Balancer v2 pools has been discovered. Our engineering and security teams are investigating as a top priority, and as soon as more information is available, we will immediately share confirmed updates and next steps.

Bitpush is continuously tracking the progress of this incident. We will synchronize the latest developments as soon as possible, so please stay tuned.