Balancer Unveils Compensation Plan Following $128 Million Hack

Balancer proposes $8M distribution to hack victims.

The team behind the DeFi protocol Balancer has proposed distributing approximately $8 million among community members affected by a hacking incident.  

According to the statement, this amount was recovered thanks to white-hat hackers and other operations. In total, around $28 million was “rescued,” but $19.7 million, represented in osETH and osGNO, remains locked in the liquid staking protocol StakeWise.

On November 3, Balancer suffered a breach in which criminals stole digital assets worth $128 million. Project representatives stated that the vulnerability was located in one of the platform’s key components—the Composable Stable pools.

The compensation plan provides for the return of assets only to liquidity providers in the affected pools. 

Funds will be distributed proportionally to the amount of tokens locked at the time of the hack. Assets will be sent in their original form. 

Additionally, part of the reparations will reward six “white hats” who managed to recover a total of $3.86 million. They will receive 10% of the recovered assets.

The largest amount was returned by a hacker under the pseudonym Anon #1—$2.68 million on the Polygon network. Cybersecurity specialist BitFinding recovered $963,832 in Ethereum.

To receive rewards, they must verify their identity through a KYC process. For this reason, one of the white-hat hackers declined the reward. 

Balancer has set a 180-day period for submitting claims. Unclaimed assets will revert to the project’s treasury. 

Earlier, following the platform’s breach, the Berachain blockchain had to conduct an emergency hard fork.