StakeWise Recovers $20.7 Million From Balancer Exploit, To Reimburse Users Pro Rata

StakeWise has pulled off a rare recovery in the DeFi world, retrieving the majority of assets lost in the recent that rocked the ecosystem.

The liquid staking platform confirmed on Nov. 4 that its DAO emergency multisig successfully recovered 5,041 osETH (worth about $19 million) and 13,495 osGNO (approximately $1.7 million) from the hacker.

According to StakeWise, the recovered assets represent 73.5% of the 6,851 osETH drained during the attack, while the remaining 26.5%, worth around $7 million, was swiftly converted to ETH by the attacker and remains unrecoverable.

The recovered funds will be distributed to affected users on a pro-rata basis according to their pre-exploit balances.

The operation was made possible through coordinated efforts between the StakeWise DAO, Balancer, and Gnosis teams, as well as individual contributors from the SEALs security collective.

In a statement, StakeWise extended thanks to Balancer and Gnosis contributors for their rapid support in executing the recovery.

The Balancer hack, one of the largest decentralized finance exploits of 2025, exploited a flaw in the manageUserBalance function of Balancer’s V2 Composable Stable Pools.

The vulnerability allowed unauthorized withdrawals by manipulating internal balances and converting Balancer Pool Tokens into underlying assets like Ethereum.

The attack spread rapidly Layer-2 networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Berachain, and Sonic, which share parts of Balancer’s codebase. Blockchain security firms PeckShield and Lookonchain later confirmed total losses exceeded $128 million, far higher than initial $70 million estimates.

In response, Balancer paused affected pools and entered recovery mode, while offering the attacker a 20% white-hat bounty (worth roughly $25.6 million) to return funds within 48 hours. The team also cautioned users about fraudulent posts impersonating Balancer during the crisis.

It is important to note that as per CertiK, total funds to hacks and exploits fell by 37% in Q3 2025, dropping from $803 million in Q2 to $509 million. Losses from code vulnerabilities fell sharply to $78 million.