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Many cryptocurrency traders are seeking answers after a successful exploit at the decentralized exchange and automated market maker Balancer resulted in more than $100 million in digital assets being stolen.<\/p>\n
In a Monday X post updating users on the exploit, Balancer said<\/a> the incident was \u201cisolated to V2 Composable Stable Pools and does not impact Balancer V3 or other Balancer pools.\u201d <\/p>\n The platform added that it had \u201cundergone extensive auditing by top firms, and had bug bounties running for a long time to incentivize independent auditors,\u201d calling into question how the exploit was accomplished.<\/p>\n \u201cBalancer went through 10+ audits,\u201d said<\/a> Suhail Kakar, a developer relations lead at the TAC blockchain on X. \u201cThe vault was audited [three] separate times by different firms still got hacked for $110M. This space needs to accept that \u2018audited by X\u2019 means almost nothing. Code is hard, DeFi is harder.\u201d<\/p>\n According to a list of Balancer V2 audits available on GitHub, four different security companies \u2014 OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, Certora, and ABDK \u2014 conducted<\/a> 11 audits of the platform\u2019s smart contracts, with the most recent on its stable pool by Trail of Bits in September 2022. <\/p>\n Cointelegraph reached out to OpenZeppelin for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication. A Trail of Bits spokesperson declined to comment on the exploit \u201cuntil the root cause is identified and all Balancer forks are safe.\u201d<\/p>\n Related: <\/strong><\/em>\u2018Attack on Bitcoin\u2019 \u2014 Bitcoiners slam \u2018legal threats\u2019 in soft fork proposal<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n The exploit, reported early on Monday, resulted in more than $116 million<\/a> worth of staked Ether (ETH<\/a>) \u2014 including StakeWise Staked ETH (OSETH), Wrapped Ether (WETH) and Lido wstETH (wSTETH) \u2014 being moved to a newly created wallet. A Nansen research analyst told Cointelegraph that the Balancer incident could have stemmed from smart contract issues that had a \u201cfaulty access check allowing the attacker to send a command to withdraw funds.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a blockchain transaction note addressing the attackers on Monday, Balancer\u2019s team offered<\/a> a white hat bounty of up to 20% of the stolen funds if the full amount was returned within 48 hours of the notice. <\/p>\n \u201c[I]f you choose not to cooperate, we have engaged independent blockchain forensics specialists and are actively cooperating with multiple law-enforcement agencies and regulatory partners,\u201d said Balancer.<\/p>\n At the time of publication, the project had not announced any additional updates on the bounty or details of the exploit.<\/p>\nProject offers a 20% white hat bounty for returning funds <\/h2>\n