Sonic Labs exploit recovery concludes as 5.8M S tokens are fully distributed to Beets.fi users affected by the November 2025 DeFi exploit.
Author: Kritika Gupta
15th January 2026- Sonic Labs has officially completed the Sonic Labs Beets.fi exploit partial recovery, closing one of the most closely watched DeFi incidents of late 2025. Following the November exploit on Beets.fi, all affected users have now received their proportional share of 5.8 million S tokens. The recovery highlights fast containment, strong coordination, and rare chain-level intervention. More importantly, it sets a new benchmark for how ecosystems respond to DeFi crises.
High Signal Summary For A Quick Glance
Wu Blockchain
@WuBlockchain
Sonic Labs has issued a partial recovery of over $500,000 to victims of a November exploit on Beets due to the Balancer incident. These 5,829,196 S tokens have been recovered and distributed proportionally to all affected users. https://t.co/RFjcKpNZsY
02:35 AM·Jan 15, 2026
The exploit occurred on November 3, 2025, when attackers abused a subtle arithmetic rounding error in Balancer V2 Composable Stable Pools. Specifically, incorrect precision handling such as using mulDown instead of mulUp allowed repeated batch swaps to manipulate pool invariants. As a result, attackers gradually drained liquidity over time.
This vulnerability did not remain isolated. Instead, it affected several Balancer deployments and forks across multiple chains. On Sonic, the most impacted pools on Beets.fi were the stS/S and stS/wOS pairs. Before containment measures took effect, losses on Sonic reached an estimated $3–3.4 million.
Meanwhile, the same flaw caused far greater damage across the broader ecosystem. In total, losses across all affected chains reached approximately $120–128 million. This incident marked Balancer’s third major exploit.
In June 2020, a flash loan attack tied to deflationary tokens led to about $500,000 in losses. Later, in August 2023, a vulnerability in boosted pools resulted in losses ranging from $900,000 to $3 million. However, the November 2025 event was the most severe, driven by weaknesses in V2 composable pool logic.
Historically, such incidents have triggered sharp but short-lived market reactions. Sonic’s native token (S) saw limited publicly reported price impact. Even so, the incident once again underscored the ongoing risks of DeFi composability.
Key milestones related to the Beets.fi exploit and Sonic recovery
A rounding error in Balancer V2 Composable Stable Pools is exploited, initiating unauthorized fund extraction.
Sonic Labs identifies irregular behavior and immediately activates emergency safety mechanisms.
Attacker-linked wallets are frozen at the chain level; swaps and transfers across Sonic are halted.
Approximately $3.3–$3.4M in assets are contained on Sonic, with limited leakage via permit-based tokens.
Sonic and Beets.fi finalize a recovery strategy and prepare a user compensation framework.
5.8M S tokens are distributed proportionally to all affected Beets.fi users.
Sonic permanently renounces unilateral wallet-freezing powers, reinforcing decentralization guarantees.
It responded within minutes of detecting suspicious activity. At approximately 3:45 AM EST, the team activated a pre-planned emergency safety mechanism.
This tool allowed Sonic to freeze attacker-linked wallets at the protocol level. Transfers, swaps, and conversions from those addresses were immediately halted.
Sonic coordinated closely with the Beets.fi team throughout the incident. Together, they shared intelligence and aligned on containment efforts. The response proved highly effective compared to other affected chains. Roughly $3.3–$3.4 million in assets were initially locked on Sonic.
Although some funds later escaped via permit-based mechanisms in tokens like stS, the majority of value remained contained. In contrast, chains such as Ethereum, Base, and Optimism had limited intervention options.
The incident highlighted Sonic’s proactive design for crisis management at the chain level.
The successful conclusion of the Sonic Labs Beets.fi exploit recovery sends a strong positive signal to the ecosystem. All 5,829,196 recovered S tokens were distributed proportionally, with a transparent GitHub breakdown published for verification.
Looking ahead, Sonic Labs has permanently renounced unilateral wallet-freezing powers.
Any future intervention will now require community or validator-approved hard forks.
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