Balancer Proposes $8M Reimbursement After $128M Exploit

The decentralized finance protocol Balancer announced a proposal on Thursday to reimburse liquidity providers with approximately $8 million in recovered funds following a major exploit that drained more than $128 million from its V2 pools across multiple blockchains in early November 2025. The incident, which occurred on November 3, affected pools on Ethereum, Polygon, Base, and Arbitrum, marking one of the largest breaches in the DeFi sector this year.

The exploit targeted a flaw in the rounding function of Balancer's Composable Stable Pools, specifically version 5. Attackers manipulated token price calculations during exact-out swaps by combining the vulnerability with batched transactions, which allowed multiple actions in a single operation. This enabled the drainage of funds from multiple pools despite the protocol undergoing 11 security audits by four blockchain firms prior to the attack. Balancer paused affected portions of the protocol immediately after detecting the breach to limit further losses, according to its postmortem report released on November 5.

Recovery efforts involved whitehat hackers, internal teams, and third-party partners, ultimately salvaging about $28...