Balancer allegedly hacked for nearly $70 million! Major security vulnerability in Decentralized Finance again.

The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sector has once again fallen into turmoil, as the well-known liquidity protocol and decentralized trading platform Balancer is suspected to have encountered a major hacking attack, with approximately $70.6 million in assets being removed in a single transaction, causing an uproar in the community. On X (formerly Twitter), the on-chain analysis firm Lookonchain revealed this abnormal transaction and pointed out that the funds came from Balancer's vault contract, with preliminary judgments indicating that it is likely a smart contract vulnerability attack.

Hacker transaction details exposed: single transfer of over 70 million USD in cryptocurrency assets

According to the trading information published by Lookonchain, this incident occurred at 07:48 UTC on November 3rd (01:48 Central Time). An unknown wallet received a total of:

6,587 Wrapped Ether (WETH), valued at approximately 24.46 million USD

6,851 osETH, worth approximately 26.86 million USD

4,260 wstETH, valued at approximately 19.27 million USD

This suspicious transaction transfers funds from the Balancer Vault contract through a custom method call. Such custom calls have often been associated with smart contract vulnerability attacks in the past, indicating that the attacker may exploit a flaw in some authorization mechanism or initialization logic to bypass normal protections.

Attack affects multiple chains? Potential losses may exceed 98 million dollars.

Current speculation suggests that this attack may not be limited to the Ethereum mainnet. According to observations of on-chain activity, the implementation of Balancer's V2 liquidity pool may have vulnerabilities, which have affected forked versions on other blockchains, including Layer 2 networks such as Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Sonic. If potential losses on these platforms are included, the total financial damage may exceed 98 million dollars.

This is not the first time Balancer has encountered security issues; in 2023, the protocol lost approximately $238,000 due to vulnerabilities. This incident undoubtedly highlights the fragility of DeFi protocols in terms of security once again.

The official response is still pending, and the community and project team urgently call for divestment.

As of now (4:53 PM CST), the Balancer team has not issued any official statement regarding the incident. This silence has caused anxiety within the entire DeFi community, with projects such as Yuzu Money and Falcon Finance urgently calling on users to “withdraw liquidity assets immediately” to avoid further losses.

The event quickly affected market sentiment, with Balancer's native token BAL dropping more than 5% on that day, reflecting investors' shaken confidence in the security of the protocol.

This article suggests that Balancer has been hacked for nearly 70 million USD! DeFi has once again revealed a significant security vulnerability, first appearing on Chain News ABMedia.