Balancer DAO Caps Recovery Bounty at 10% After $128M Exploit

Balancer’s community approved a proposal to offer up to 10% as a bounty for information or returned assets tied to the decentralized automated market maker’s exploit in November, with the vote reaching quorum and passing in this round of governance.

Proposal BIP-908 passed unanimously in a Feb. 10 snapshot vote, with 100% of participants in favor and a quorum of 158%, although only nine votes were cast and a single vote represented over 76% of the total voting power.

The proposal, submitted by Balancer DAO executor Maxyz, sets the bounty at a maximum of 10% of the recovered value. It’s worth noting that the Balancer security team initially offered a 20% one-time whitehat bounty right after the hack, which this proposal cuts in half.

The November 2025 attack drained roughly $128 million from Balancer V2 pools by exploiting a rounding and precision bug in composable stable-pool math and using batch-swap mechanics to quickly extract funds. The losses affected several networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Sonic and Berachain.

As The Defiant reported earlier, Gnosis Chain, also affected by the Balancer hack, chose to implement a hard fork to return funds that had been frozen because of the exploit.

While recovery teams have already returned some funds, a significant portion still sits in attacker addresses.

Balancer is currently ranked 11th among DEXs by daily volumes, with just over $203 million traded in the past 24 hours.