"Balancer Hacked: Update on the $128 Million Case" Gnosis Chain announces the initiation of a Hard Fork to recover the stolen funds.

Gnosis Chain official X account issued an announcement, declaring the initiation of a Hard Fork to recover funds lost in the Balancer hacker attack. (Previous context: Balancer issued a “final ultimatum” to the hacker with a 96-hour countdown to return the money: otherwise, all means will be used to find you) (Background Supplement: Berachain: “Victims of the Balancer hack event must check their own status and promptly reclaim ETH and BERA”)

Less than a month after the significant market crash on October 1011, the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer V2 suffered a severe hacker attack in early November. The hackers exploited a rounding error vulnerability in the protocol's Composable Stable Pools, accumulating losses through numerous small exchange operations. In just 30 minutes, they withdrew funds from pools across multiple chains, including Ethereum, mainnet, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, and Gnosis Chain, totaling losses of up to $128 million. This is one of the largest attack incidents in the DeFi sector in 2025, primarily affecting staked tokens such as wstETH, osETH, and WETH.

After the attack, some funds were recovered or frozen through white hat hacker actions and on-chain emergency measures. Among them, Gnosis Chain successfully froze approximately 9.4 million dollars belonging to the hacker's address through a validator-approved soft fork, preventing further transfers.

Gnosis Chain announces 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, which was discussed and voted on, and it was decided to execute a Hard Fork.

The Hard Fork was activated around 16:00 UTC on December 22, and node operators must update to the specified client version. Nodes that do not follow the majority of the staking chain will face penalties, including the cessation of staking rewards and even slashing. In this regard, on December 23, 2025, the official Gnosis Chain X account also issued an announcement, stating:

“Yesterday, our operator community decided to execute a Hard Fork to recover the funds lost in the Balancer hack. Now, these funds are out of the hacker's control. All node operators who have not yet taken action should carry out the necessary operations 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. The funds are now out of the hacker's control.

All remaining node operators should take action to avoid penalties.

— Gnosis Chain (@gnosischain) December 23, 2025