Balancer Users Withdraw $200 Million Amid Critical Vulnerability Threat

The DeFi protocol warned users of a critical vulnerability affecting V2 pools, urging them to withdraw funds from affected pools immediately.

Decentralized automated market maker Balancer disclosed that several of its liquidity pools were at risk on Tuesday. 

In a Twitter announcement, the Balancer team asked users to withdraw funds from the affected V2 pools immediately, and said that although measures had been put in place to secure most of the Total Value Locked (TVL) in the protocol, some funds were still at risk.

The Balancer UI will inform all users if they hold liquidity within affected LPs with step-by-step withdrawal instructions.

For more information, the following forum post details all pools which are affected.https://t.co/zi8DJUtGEB

— Balancer (@Balancer) August 22, 2023

Shortly after, the team informed users that just 1.4% of TVL was still at risk, and only boosted pools were affected. The affected pools are Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Gnosis, Fantom and zkEVM.

“Several pools are paused to mitigate risks and will remain so, with users advised to withdraw liquidity as soon as possible,” said the team in a tweet.

Although Balancer estimates that just $10 million is still at risk, it appears that users have been pulling funds off the platform of much higher value. Data from DeFiLlama shows that over $200 million has been withdrawn from Balancer V2 since, with TVL falling to around $544 million at the time of writing. 

In response to the vulnerability, Balancer’s Emergency SubDAO acted to enable a proportional exit from all affected pools, and pause any pools still within the pause window.

The team of developers said they were not at liberty to make a full public disclosure about the vulnerability until all funds had been secured, but planned to provide additional details through a post-mortem report at a later time.