jakiro
On November 3, 2025, at 15:48 pm, a mysterious address (0xAa760D53541d8390074c61DEFeaba314675b8e3f) suddenly received a large number of tokens from the balancer vault of the old DeFi protocol on the Ethereum chain and multiple second-layer chains and compatible chains.
In just a few hours, hackers succeeded in large numbers and stole various digital assets worth over 100 million US dollars in broad daylight and in full view of the public.
From 17:19 onwards, the hackers began to disperse the stolen funds to other addresses.
As of the time of writing this article (around 22:30), the hacker’s first address still contains various tokens worth more than 95 million US dollars.
There is currently no specific statement on what vulnerability the hackers exploited.However, Jiaolian saw at least two pieces of information:
First, only the v2 version contract has this vulnerability.The latest v3 version has not been stolen yet.
Second, the vulnerability is in the smart contract code of the v2 pool.It is not a leak of the management private key.
When Jiao Lian saw this major emergency in the afternoon, he was very shocked.Why?
In Jiaolian’s mind, Balancer is a DEX product that keeps pace with established DeFi protocols such as Uniswap, Aave, and Compound (decentralized trading protocols, friends who don’t know about them can ask deepseek, and Jiaolian will not go into details here).Its weight in the DeFi track should be said to be very important, and it is also considered one of the so-called “DeFi blue chip stocks”.Moreover, its development basically started at the same time as Uniswap – the concept was proposed in 2018, v1 was launched simultaneously with the introduction of the DeFi concept in early 2020, v2 was released in early 2021, and v3 was launched at the end of 2024…
Now that the Balancer has been stolen, and at the tail end of a four-year bull market cycle in the traditional sense, this incident may have a huge impact on industry confidence, and is likely to cause a ripple effect – DeFi blue chips are stolen, raising questions about the security of DeFi; and DeFi (decentralized finance) is the biggest narrative of Ethereum and all smart chains; the most likely breakthrough for Ethereum and all smart chains to face traditional capital is the so-called financial settlement layer…
Now if even the old DeFi blue chips will collapse, will other DeFi be in danger of collapse sooner or later?If DeFi is exposed to unknown risks, is the financial settlement layer narrative of the smart chain still valid?If the so-called decentralization will only make everyone helpless and helpless when a hacker incident occurs, then does decentralized finance bring greater risks or greater benefits to finance?If this series of issues are subject to continuous questioning, then it may not only be Balancer, not just DeFi, but the entire smart chain, and even the entire encryption industry that will suffer a reputation collapse.
As a veteran protocol, Balancer has done all the security audits, bug bounties and other tasks that top DeFi products can do.Its collapse has caused all DeFi, including top products, to fall into a deadlock that cannot be self-certified: they all use the same professional audits and the same security methods. How can you guarantee that your products will not be hacked?
The scientific and rigorous answer can only be: no guarantee.
Since there is no guarantee, once a hacker incident occurs, are there any emergency measures to control or recover the losses?
The answer seems to be: no – because the protocol is “decentralized” and the chain running the protocol is also “decentralized”.
Once any emergency measures are taken, it will end with the narrative of “decentralization” in the blockchain industry.
It is neither possible to guarantee absolute safety nor to control losses when problems occur. So with such industry characteristics, how can we impress the large capital of traditional finance and dare to put large amounts of funds on the chain and put them into these protocols?
Even if you are a JiaoChain, you can’t help but feel the horror of a bullet flying past your face because you put some assets in other DeFi protocols besides Balancer.
If you are not careful, you may suffer the disaster of losing your entire fortune.
I often walk by the river and it is inevitable that my shoes will get wet.
Even if you sail with caution for thousands of years, the boat may still capsize.
In fact, it is quite incomprehensible.
It is conceivable that the aftershocks of this incident will have bad consequences on the currently jittery market.
