Berachain Recovers $12.8 Million From BEX/Balancer Exploit

Highlights:

• Berachain recovers $12.8 million stolen from the BEX/Balancer v2 exploit.
• The team confirmed that the network has gone live again, and affected users will soon start receiving their funds.
• Berachain warned that some irregularities might persist in its operations.

EVM-identical blockchain, Berachain Foundation has recovered roughly $12.8 million stolen during the recent BEX/Balancer v2 exploit. Berachain confirmed the recovery in a tweet on November 4, stating that the funds have been fully returned to the Berachain Foundation wallet.

According to the X post, the Berachain network is now live again after previously halting operations to mitigate the exploit. The team thanked the white hat hacker who assisted in the funds recovery. They said his wallet will no longer be labelled “malicious” and that they were considering a bounty to show appreciation for his cooperation.

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

Users Should Anticipate Some Functional Irregularities

Following the recovery, Berachain has reopened minting and redemption for HONEY tokens. However, all Berachain Exchange (BEX) functions, including swaps, deposits, and withdrawals, remain disabled. Berachain warned that some irregularities might appear in the reported Annual Percentage Rate (APR) and on-chain rewards as Berachain Governance Token (BGT) emissions and incentives were paused for 24 hours.

The team also noted that they will cooperate with key infrastructure providers to ensure that all essential systems, including Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs), oracles, developer tools, and block explorers, are fully updated. Once this is complete, the team will release a more detailed announcement outlining the next steps.

Users’ Funds Disbursement Plan

The Berachain team disclosed that over 1,000 users had deposits in some of the exploited pools, like iBERA. In contrast, other pools like USDe were more concentrated with fewer depositors. To ensure fair recovery, Berachain’s core team is developing a system that will identify original depositors and distribute funds back to their wallets. “Please bear with us as we ensure that this is carried out diligently and safely over the coming days,” the team added.

For unaffected users, withdrawals remain temporarily locked, pending the completion of the investigation into the cause of the Balancer vulnerability. “We will track the situation closely and follow Balancer’s lead to make sure that funds can be safely withdrawn/returned to users ASAP,” the team stated

Overview of the Balancer Exploit

On November 3, Balancer confirmed a major hack that drained over $129 million from its v2 pools. The scammers exploited a precision error in the “manageUserBalance” function to steal millions in digital assets across several chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain.

After the exploit, the hacker quickly converted over 50% of the stolen funds to ETH. Balancer attempted to recover the funds by offering a 20% white-hat bounty, valued at $25.6 million, to the hacker. Meanwhile, Berachain was affected through its Fork, BEX. This led its validators to pause operations and issue a hard fork to freeze the scammer’s assets and mend vulnerabilities.

The Berachain validators have coordinated to purposefully halt the Berachain network as the core team performs an emergency hard fork to address Balancer V2 related exploits on the BEX.

This halt has been executed purposefully, and the network will be operational shortly upon…

— Berachain Foundation 🐻⛓ (@berachain) November 3, 2025

Hack Incidents Dropped Significantly in October

According to blockchain security platform PeckShieldAlert, 15 major crypto exploits occurred in October, resulting in total losses worth $18.18 million. “This marks a -85.7% decrease from September’s $127.06 million,” PeckShieldAlert added.

Last month, the top three hacks included the Garden Finance exploit that cleared roughly $11 million. The attack on Typus Finance resulted in losses worth $3.4 million, while the MIM_Spell exploit cleared $1.8 million. Meanwhile, the October 10 crypto crash, which wiped out over $20 billion, remains the largest liquidation event in history.

#PeckShieldAlert October 2025 saw ~15 major crypto exploits, resulting in total losses of $18.18M. This marks a -85.7% decrease from September's $127.06M.

Notably, the Oct. 10 crypto crash—which wiped out over $20 billion in leveraged positions within hours—was the biggest… pic.twitter.com/pDI9Cqs25D

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) November 1, 2025