Berachain Recovers $12.8 Million Lost in Balancer Exploit

Summary: The Berachain Foundation has successfully recovered $12.8 million that was lost during the Balancer V2 exploit on November 3. This recovery is notable as it represents one of the few complete restitutions following significant hacks in decentralized finance. The foundation worked with a white-hat hacker to retrieve the funds and has begun to resume key operations on its network.

Key Takeaways

Berachain has recovered $12.8 million lost in the Balancer V2 exploit.
The recovery involved cooperation with a white-hat hacker and an emergency network restart.
Key functions such as HONEY minting have resumed following the return of funds.
Over 1,000 affected users will be compensated according to their original deposits.
The exploit underscored security challenges in decentralized finance (DeFi) systems.

Berachain restores funds lost in Balancer hack

Berachain's Swift Recovery Actions

The successful retrieval of funds was executed with the help of a white-hat hacker who assisted in returning the stolen assets after Berachain's network underwent an emergency restart. The foundation has expressed gratitude to the hacker and is considering offering a bounty as a token of appreciation. Following the recovery, Berachain has started unpausing critical network functions like HONEY minting and redemption.

"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 (https://t.co/HjCONAGpOZ). Chain is live.

We'd like to thank the white hat who worked with us to make this happen – we'll ensure that…"
— Berachain Foundation 🐻⛓ (@berachain) November 4, 2025

After the exploit, Berachain temporarily halted all swaps, deposits, and withdrawals to prevent additional losses, as the vulnerability in the Balancer protocol was still under investigation. The foundation plans to redistribute the recovered funds to over 1,000 impacted users based on their original wallet deposits.

Additionally, the liquid staking platform StakeWise also managed to recover around $20 million in stolen assets during this breach.

Understanding the Balancer Exploit

On November 3, the Balancer exploit targeted the V2 Composable Stable Pools of the protocol, utilizing a precision error in the "manageUserBalance" function. This flaw enabled the attacker to siphon off approximately $128 million in assets across various chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain.

Quickly, more than half of the stolen funds were exchanged for ETH. In response, Balancer entered recovery mode, offering a 20% white-hat bounty worth $25.6 million and encouraging the hacker to return the funds within a 48-hour window. Although nine audits had been performed on its vault system, this incident has sparked renewed conversations about the limits of security in composable DeFi architectures.

Berachain, a Layer-1 network within the Cosmos ecosystem that operates on a proof-of-liquidity consensus mechanism, was impacted through its Balancer fork, known as BEX. The validators swiftly halted the network and implemented an emergency hard fork to immobilize the assets owned by the assailant. Ultimately, they were able to recover the entire amount after negotiations with the MEV operator behind the exploit.

Following the fallout, the BERA token initially dipped by 10% but regained its value following the positive recovery announcement, indicating a resurgence of confidence in the project's resilience.