Forks Are Now Bleeding Out Too

Initial reports suggests that Balancer v2 pools were impacted in the exploit, while v3 remains safe.

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 hour.

In 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 check.

Alchemy 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 finished. That 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 pools. Our 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, EuroDNS. While the protocol didn’t confirm losses, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT estimated roughly $240,000 was stolen.

Amidst 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.