Balancer Protocol Faces Exploit Exceeding $128 Million

• $128.6 million in digital assets were withdrawn from the protocol wallets.
• Analysts attribute the leak to a smart contract validation error.
• The team confirmed the potential hack and announced the launch of an investigation.

The Balancer protocol suffered an exploit that resulted in more than $128 million in assets being withdrawn from its liquidity pools, PeckShield analysts were the first to report, noting a series of suspicious transactions.

Etherscan data records large transfers from Balancer’s main address to an external wallet. Among the assets withdrawn are about 6,587 WETH ($24.5 million), 6,851 osETH ($26.9 million), and 4,260 wstETH ($19.3 million). The cumulative transaction volume indicates that the protocol stores may have been compromised.

The Balancer team has confirmed that the project is under potential attack. According to the developers, they are trying to identify the source of the threat.

Trading Strategy CEO Mikko Otamaa suggested that the cause could have been a bug in the logic of checking smart contracts. He noted that the vulnerability probably did not affect all versions of Balancer, but if the problem is also present in older V2 forks, the total damage could exceed $110 million.

PeckShield said the attack is continuing on other networks where Balancer is deployed. Analysts said the scale of the incident has already exceeded initial estimates and the flow of funds continues. According to the latest figures, losses have surpassed the $128 million mark.

Balancer is a decentralized exchange and portfolio manager operating since 2020. The protocol allows users to trade tokens and provide liquidity to pools with automatic balancing.

According to analysts, only in the Ethereum network, the Balancer project holds assets worth over $350 million. Against the background of reports of the exploit, the rate of the protocol token (BAL) fell by more than 4%, reflecting the market reaction to the possible loss of liquidity and security risks.