The Berachain Foundation has confirmed the recovery of $12.8 million lost during the November 3 Balancer V2 exploit.
Summary
- Berachain recovered the entire $12.8 million lost to the Balancer exploit after shutting down and restarting its network.
- The recovery was achieved through a white-hat collaboration, with redistribution plans for affected users.
- The Balancer hack caused $128 million in cross-chain losses, raising new concerns about DeFi composability and audit restrictions.
The recovery marks a rare case of full restitution after one of the biggest decentralized finance hacks of 2025.
In a late November update on
Quick action restores Berachain’s operations
The recovery was coordinated with a white-hat hacker who worked to return the assets after the chain’s emergency restart. The foundation said it will consider a premium in valuation and has begun resuming key network functions such as 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
Berachain (BERA) temporarily halted all swaps, deposits and withdrawals following the exploit to prevent further losses, citing caution as the underlying vulnerability of the Balancer is still under investigation. More than 1,000 affected users will receive the recovered funds through a redistribution system that links deposits to original wallet addresses.
In addition to Berachain, liquid staking platform StakeWise has also managed to recover approximately $20 million in stolen assets.
Background information on the Balancer exploit
The Balancer exploit on November 3 targeted the protocol’s V2 Composable Stable Pools, exploiting a precision error in the “manageUserBalance” function to extract approximately $128 million in assets across multiple chains – including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic and Berachain.
More than half of the stolen funds were quickly converted into ETH. Balancer entered recovery mode and offered a 20% white-hat bounty worth $25.6 million, urging the attacker to return funds within 48 hours. Despite nine audits of the vault system, the incident has reignited discussions about the security limits of composable DeFi architectures.
Berachain, a Cosmos-based Layer-1 network with proof-of-liquidity consensus, was hit via its Balancer fork, BEX. The validators stopped the chain within hours and issued an emergency hard fork to freeze the attacker’s assets, later receiving a full refund after negotiations with the MEV operator behind the exploit.
After the incident, the BERA token fell 10% but recovered following the recovery announcement, demonstrating renewed confidence in the project’s resilience.
