OG DeFi Giant Balancer Exploited for $128M: Forks Are Now Bleeding Out Too

OG DeFi platform Balancer has been exploited for more than $128 million in several digital assets, with multiple blockchain security firms confirming the attack in real-time and new details emerging by the ￰0￱ its latest update, blockchain security firm PeckShield stated that Balancer and its forks are now confirmed to be under attack, with cumulative losses across chains of roughly $128.64 million already. Meanwhile, Mikko Ohtamaa, CEO and co-founder of Trading Strategy, revealed that the likely culprit is a faulty smart contract ￰1￱ engineer Uttam Singh broke down the damage chain by chain and observed that at least 27 Balancer-like forks exist, per DeFiLlama, which implies the contagion might not even be close to ￰2￱ uncertainty is amplified by the fact that the exploiter address is still active and is deploying new contracts, minting custom ERC-20s, and probing continuously.

Balancer’s only official statement so far reads , “We’re aware of a potential exploit impacting Balancer v2 ￰3￱ engineering and security teams are investigating with high priority. We’ll share verified updates and next steps as soon as we have more information.” In September 2023, Balancer’s front-end suffered a DNS attack caused by a social engineering breach at its domain registrar, ￰4￱ the protocol didn’t confirm losses, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT estimated roughly $240,000 was ￰5￱ this chaos, the analytics platform, Lookonchain, flagged a whale wallet 0x0090, which had been dormant for three years, suddenly woke up right after the exploit was confirmed and rushed to pull more than $6.5 million out of Balancer.