Update on the $128 million Balancer hack case” Gnosis Chain announced the launch of a “hard fork” to recover the stolen funds

The official X account of Gnosis Chain issued an announcement announcing the launch of a hard fork to recover funds lost in the Balancer hacking attack.
(Preliminary summary: Balancer gave the hackers an "ultimatum" of 96 hours to repay the money: otherwise they will use all means to find you)
(Background supplement: Berachain: Victims of the "Balancer hack" must check their status and get back ETH and BERA in time)

After the 1011 market crash in October, less than 1 Months ago, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer V2 suffered a serious hacker attack in early November. The hackers exploited the precision rounding error vulnerability of the Composable Stable Pools in the protocol and accumulated losses through a large number of small exchange operations. In just 30 minutes, the hackers lost money from Ethereum, the main network, and Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, and Gnosis Chain. When multiple chain pools withdraw funds, the total loss is as high as US$128 million. This is one of the largest attacks in the DeFi field in 2025, mainly affecting pledged tokens such as wstETH, osETH, and WETH.

After the attack, some funds were recovered or frozen through white hat hacking operations and on-chain emergency measures. Among them, Gnosis Chain successfully froze approximately US$9.4 million in funds belonging to the hacker address through a soft fork approved by the verifier to prevent further transfer.

Gnosis Chain announced the implementation of a hard fork

In order to return the frozen funds to the victims, the Gnosis Chain community proposed a governance proposal on December 12, 2025, and after discussion and voting, decided to implement a hard fork.

The hard fork has been activated at around 16:00 UTC on December 22. Node operators need to update to the specified client version. Nodes that do not follow the majority of the pledge chain will face penalties, including stopping staking rewards or even slashing (penalties). In response to this, on December 23, 2025, the Gnosis Chain official Funds lost in the hack. The funds are now out of the hacker's control. All node operators who have not yet taken action should take necessary actions as soon as possible to avoid penalties. Yesterday, our community of operators decided to execute a hard fork to recover the funds lost in Balancer hack. control.

All remaining node operators should take action to avoid penalties.

— Gnosis Chain (@gnosischain) December 23, 2025