73.5% of stolen osETH returned: Balancer hack causes excitement!

73.5% of stolen osETH returned: Balancer hack causes excitement!

On November 4, 2025, it was announced that StakeWise successfully recovered 73.5% of the stolen osETH, worth approximately $19 million, from the hack on the DeFi platform Balancer. This attack, which exploited a vulnerability in Balancer's smart contract, had stolen over $128 million in cryptocurrencies, far exceeding the initial estimates of $70 million reported by blockchain analysis firms.

The repatriated funds will be refunded to affected users based on their account balances before the attack. The StakeWise DAO was able to recover around 5,041 osETH and 13,495 osGNO (around $1.7 million). This recovery represents 73.5% of the total 6,851 osETH stolen.

Details about the hack

The attack on Balancer exploited a vulnerability in the manageUserBalance function of the V2 Composable Stable Pools, which allowed unauthorized persons to withdraw funds. The attackers manipulated internal balances and converted Balancer Pool tokens into underlying assets such as Ethereum. The attack spread across multiple Layer 2 networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Berachain and Sonic.

The remaining 26.5% of the stolen assets, worth an estimated $7 million, were converted into ETH by the attackers and could not be recovered. This is feared to be money laundering as the attackers consolidated the stolen tokens into multiple wallets and began converting portions of them into ETH.

Following the incident, Balancer paused the affected pools and entered “recovery mode.” To recover the funds, Balancer offered the attacker a 20% white hat reward of approximately $25.6 million if the stolen funds were returned within 48 hours. Meanwhile, users were warned about scammers posing as part of the Balancer team.

Reactions and outlook

Several connected protocols, including Gnosis, Berachain and Beefy, temporarily suspended their operations to contain the impact of the hack. This incident is considered Balancer's largest hack to date and joins the list of increasing DeFi security incidents in 2025. A comprehensive follow-up report and next steps are expected in the near future.

The developments surrounding this incident continue to be of great interest, both to affected users and the entire DeFi community. StakeWise, although they were able to recover a significant portion of taxpayer funds, faces a significant task in restoring user trust and addressing future security vulnerabilities.

For further updates on this topic and detailed reports on the incident, you can visit the full information Crypto News read up.