Berachain Confirms Recovery Of $12.8M Stolen During Balancer Exploit

The Berachain Foundation has confirmed the recovery of the $12.8 million stolen from the BEX/Balancer v2 exploit. 

The Foundation distributed an emergency hard fork following the hack to address a vulnerability in its decentralized exchange, stemming from a larger exploit targeting Balancer v2 pools and forks across multiple chains. 

Berachain Recovers Funds 

The Berachain Foundation has recovered all the funds ($12.8 million) stolen during the BEX/Balancer v2 exploit. The recovered funds have been returned to the Berachain Foundation Deployer. The Foundation also thanked the white hat hacker who worked with the Berachain team to make the recovery possible. However, it noted that users may encounter some irregularities in reported APRs across the chain. 

“We are happy to confirm that all funds (approx $12.8m) from the BEX / Balancer v2 exploit have been returned to the Berachain Foundation Deployer. We’d like to thank the white hat who worked with us to make this happen – we’ll ensure that his wallet is unlabelled as malicious, and work towards a potential bounty as a sign of our appreciation.”

The Foundation also stated that it is working with infrastructure providers to ensure that critical infrastructure is updated over the next few hours. According to the statement, there were originally over 1,000 depositors in some of the exploited pools, while others, like USDe, were much more concentrated. 

“We will be working with infra providers to ensure that key infra is up to date (RPCs, oracles, dev tooling, block explorers, etc) over the next few hours, at which point we’ll proceed with more detailed comms about next steps.”

Berachain Distributes Hard Fork 

The Berachain Foundation also announced that it had distributed an emergency hard fork binary to validators. The hard fork addresses a vulnerability in BEX, the foundation’s decentralized exchange. The vulnerability stemmed from a broader exploit that hit Balancer v2 pools and forks across multiple chains. The Foundation posted on X stating that the hard fork binary had been distributed to validators, several of whom had already initiated and completed the upgrades. The hard fork binary prevents addresses from moving exploited tokens outside of the network, and prevents further attacks on Berachain. 

“Before going live and producing blocks once again, we’d like to ensure that core infrastructure partners necessary for chain operations … have updated their RPCs, so at this point they will be our main blocker to resuming liveness.”

Berachain validators halted the network on November 3 after Balancer v2 was hacked, with the protocol losing around $128 million from pools across multiple chains, including Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Arbitrum. 

The BEX Vulnerability 

According to blockchain analytics firm Nansen, the exploit was due to a faulty access-control mechanism that allowed the attacker to fabricate fees and convert them into withdrawable real assets through a pair of Ethereum transactions, executed within 90 seconds. According to the Berachain team, the exploit exposed a vulnerability in BEX, a fork of Balancer v2, resulting in $12 million being drained from BEX’s Ethena/Honey tripool. 

“Given that it affected non-native assets (not just BERA), the rollback/rollforward involves more than a simple hardfork, hence the halt as a full solution is finalized.”

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