The Berachain Foundation announced it has successfully recovered the entire $12.8 million lost in the recent Balancer V2 exploit.
Author: Sahil Thakur
5th November 2025 – In a rare victory for DeFi, the Berachain Foundation announced it has successfully recovered the entire $12.8 million lost in the recent Balancer V2 exploit. The recovery follows swift coordination with a white-hat hacker and a decisive emergency chain restart.
The exploit, which occurred on November 3, targeted Balancer V2’s Composable Stable Pools by exploiting a precision error in the manageUserBalance function. This vulnerability enabled attackers to siphon off roughly $128 million across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base, Optimism, and Berachain.
Within hours, Berachain validators halted the chain and deployed an emergency hard fork to freeze the attacker’s assets. Soon after, negotiations with a cooperating MEV operator led to the complete return of the funds. As of November 4, the foundation confirmed all stolen assets had returned to its deployer wallet.
Berachain’s response wasn’t just technical, it was community-first. Over 1,000 affected users will receive full restitution. The team is building a redistribution system that maps original deposit amounts to individual wallet addresses.
Although BEX pools remain paused for swaps, deposits, and withdrawals, Berachain has already unpaused HONEY minting and redemption. The team assured users that all remaining operations will resume cautiously, prioritizing safety.
The Balancer V2 attack exposed the limits of composability and raised new concerns over the effectiveness of even heavily audited DeFi protocols. Balancer, despite having conducted nine audits on its vault system, saw $128 million drained. It is now offering a 20% bounty to incentivize the return of remaining funds.
Berachain’s full recovery sets it apart from other affected projects. StakeWise, another victim, also recovered approximately $20 million.
Following the exploit, Berachain’s native token BERA dropped by 10%. However, after news of the recovery broke, it bounced back, demonstrating the community’s confidence in Berachain’s resilience and crisis management.
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Berachain’s team continues working with infrastructure providers to update RPC nodes, oracles, developer tooling, and block explorers. In the coming days, they plan to share more detailed communication around the recovery process and roadmap ahead.
The foundation has also hinted at a potential bounty for the white-hat hacker and committed to removing any malicious labels from their wallet.
“We’re doing our best to be diligent and communicative in this process,” the team shared on X, “and will continue to keep users up to speed.”
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