DeFi exploits in 2025 are on the rise, leading to reduced investor confidence in the sector.
Balancer, a decentralized exchange and liquidity protocol built on Ethereum, has suffered a major breach. Balancer has reportedly lost over $110 million in digital assets, marking one of the largest DeFi exploits witnessed in 2025.
On-chain data analytics provider Lookonchain reported the latest attack on Balancer. According to Lookonchain, the attackers initially transferred $70.6 million in digital assets from Balancer to a new wallet.
This occurred in three different transactions. The first transaction spotlighted was 6,587 WETH, valued at around $24.46 million. These funds were moved from Balancer.
This outflow was followed by 6,851 osETH, valued at nearly $26.86 million, and 4,260 wstETH, worth approximately $19.27 million.
The attack did not stop there, as Lookonchain reported that losses from the Balancer exploit have already exceeded $110 million.
Lookochain did not give explicit details about the nature of the attack. However, CEO and co-founder of Trading Strategy, Mikko Ohtamaa, pointed to a faulty smart contract check as the possible root cause.
Ohtamaa disclosed via an X thread that not all Balancer versions appear to be affected. He, however, noted that the sum may grow even larger if Balancer v2 forks are exploitable as well.
Meanwhile, Balancer has confirmed in an X post that the exploit has impacted v2 pools. The team said its engineering and security departments are investigating with high priority. The DEX also promised to share verified updates and mitigation steps.
While the attack continued, a dormant whale with funds in Balancer rushed to withdraw their entire funds. This whale, which has been dormant for over three years, withdrew $6.5 million from the platform, according to Lookonchain.
Worth noting that this is not the first time Balancer has faced such an exploit. In 2023, exploiters stole around $238,000 worth of crypto assets from the protocol.
The recent Balancer attack comes amid several others that have occurred in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sector this year. In a previous update, we covered that a 22-year-old Canadian, Andean Medjedovic, faced charges for hacking DeFi protocols.
Medjedovic was accused of stealing $65 million and attempting extortion to control KyberSwap and Indexed Finance.
As security breaches and global uncertainty continued to rise, the DeFi total value locked dropped 30% at one point to $95.78. According to our analysis, the drop in DeFi TVL signalled reduced confidence among investors.
Besides DeFi protocols, exchanges also came under attack by bad actors this year. As highlighted in our previous article, bad actors stole more than $48 million in cryptocurrencies from the Iran-based Nobitex exchange.
Analysts linked the exploit to escalating geopolitical tension between Iran and Israel earlier this year.
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