BAL

Balancer

Crypto News Gnosis chain operators completed a hard fork on Monday to recover funds from a November Balancer exploit that resulted in $116 million worth of stolen digital assets. The project announced the hard fork in a Tuesday X post following a notice for node operators. The re...

What Did Gnosis Do After the Balancer Hack? Operators of the Gnosis Chain carried out a hard fork this week to recover funds linked to the $116 million Balancer exploit disclosed in November. The action followed earlier emergency measures taken by validators and comes after weeks...

Gnosis Chain has confirmed that it has executed a hard fork to recover approximately $9.4 million in funds frozen following the November 2025 Balancer V2 exploit. The hard for k ac tivated on December 22, 2025, and the announcement came the next day via the official Gnosis Chain account. According to the official announcement posted on Gnosis Chain’s X page, the hard fork has been activated, and the funds are no longer within the hacker’s control. To ensure consensus, the post also urged all remaining node operators to take action to avoid penalties. The decision to rewrite the blockchain’s recent history to make users whole was touted as a solution, but it has exposed fault lines over governance and precedent on Gnosis Chain. Gnosis Chain initiates a hard fork According to a governance forum post, Philippe Schommers, Gnosis’ head of infrastructure, floated the idea that the network would need to undergo a hard fork on December 12. According to Schommers, this would help return funds frozen during the recent exploit of the DeFi protocol Balancer . The hard fork was scheduled to go live on December 22. Schommers wrote to nodes that fail to follow the chain with a majority of stake that they will face penalties. He said the team was focused on returning user funds by Christmas. The move was framed as a technical “rescue mission,” but the announcement sparked a heated debate in the project’s community over who gets to decide when a blockchain’s immutability can be broken. At the time, Schommers called the surrounding debate “an important one and, as always, we welcome all contributions.” He also emphasized that the hard fork depends on Gnosis Chain validators to go through. “As it stands, our validators have a choice to exercise their collective power transparently, to protect users, even as we work toward a future where no one has that power at all,” he said. Schommers also countered fears of the update affecting the chain’s immutability. “The hard fork requires relatively minor changes that do not affect chain history – and therefore do not affect fundamental immutability, which stands at the core of our ethos,” he said. Why is Gnosis Chain going through a hard fork? Balancer , an established decentralized exchange and automated market maker protocol, was targeted in November when an attacker exploited a vulnerability to siphon $128 million from Balancer V2 liquidity pools across multiple chains. Harry Donnelly, founder and CEO of Circuit, has tagged Balancer’s breach “a serious warning” for the DeFi ecosystem. According to Donelly, the target was “one of the most trusted names in the space” and “an early pioneer with a culture of compliance, backed by rigorous audits and open disclosure.” In response to the exploit, validators approved a soft fork that restricted bridge movements, freezing $9.4 million of the stolen assets on-chain. Recovering those funds required a hard fork, which is what triggered debates on the network’s commitment to immutability. There have been mixed reactions to the move, with the camp split over how to interpret it. Lefteris Karapetsas, the founder of Rotki, a privacy-focused portfolio tracker, claimed the move reflects accountability rather than centralization. “The coordinated soft fork and the clear plan toward a hard fork show that Gnosis Chain takes security, users, and ecosystem responsibility seriously,” wrote Karapetsas. Others have claimed it sets a dangerous future precedent and have demanded formal rules to govern future interventions. A user under the alias TheVoidFreak noted in their forum response that accepting a hard fork requires “a strict framework that no one can deviate from,” arguing that without it, violations of “Code is law” and immutability would have unmanaged consequences. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .

The Gnosis hard fork, executed on Monday, recovered funds from the November Balancer exploit where $116 million in crypto was stolen. Following a soft fork by most validators, this hard fork placed the assets out of the hacker's control, enabling potential recovery for affected users by Christmas. Gnosis chain operators implemented a hard fork to [...]

Gnosis Chain to Hard Fork and Recover $120M Lost in Balancer Hack

As the DeFi protocol Balancer suffers a devastating $128 million hack in less than 30 minutes on November 3, 2025, the crypto industry faces an existential question: how can blockchain infrastructure defend against both today’s sophisticated exploits and tomorrow’s quantum threat...

USPD is facing a severe security breach after an attacker quietly gained control of its proxy contract months ago and used that access to mint new tokens and drain funds. USPD disclosed the incident on Dec. 5, saying the exploit…

Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade is now live on mainnet, marking a major structural change in how the network handles data and scaling. The upgrade was activated at epoch 411392 at 21:49:11 UTC, with the official Ethereum account first signalling “upgrade in progress . . . activating Fusaka @ epoch 411392 // 21:49:11 UTC” and then confirming that “Fusaka is live on Ethereum mainnet!” In its announcement , the account highlighted three core elements of Fusaka. PeerDAS “now unlocks 8x data throughput for rollups,” substantially expanding the amount of data that rollup-based layer 2 networks can publish to the network. The upgrade also introduces “UX improvements via the R1 curve & pre-confirmations,” and is described as explicit “prep for scaling the L1 with gas limit increase & more.” The project added that community members and core developers will “continue to monitor for issues over the next 24 hrs.” Why Fusaka Is ‘Significant’ For Ethereum Vitalik Buterin framed the core of the upgrade in unusually direct terms. “PeerDAS in Fusaka is significant because it literally is sharding,” he wrote. “Ethereum is coming to consensus on blocks without requiring any single node to see more than a tiny fraction of the data. And this is robust to 51% attacks – it’s client-side probabilistic verification, not validator voting.” In other words, the network can now agree on blocks even though no node has to download all of the associated data, relying instead on probabilistic verification on the client side. Buterin tied this to a long-running research line, noting that “sharding has been a dream for Ethereum since 2015, and data availability sampling since 2017,” and linking back to early research work on data availability and erasure coding. With Fusaka, that architecture is no longer just a roadmap concept but a live mechanism securing Ethereum’s data layer. At the same time, Buterin was clear that Fusaka does not complete the sharding roadmap. He stressed that “there are three ways that the sharding in Fusaka is incomplete.” First, he argued that “we can process O(c^2) transactions (where c is the per-node compute) on L2s, but not on the ethereum L1,” adding that “if we want to scaling to benefit the ethereum L1 as well, beyond what we can get by constant-factor upgrades like BAL and ePBS, we need mature ZK-EVMs.” Second, he pointed to the “proposer/builder bottleneck,” where “the builder needs to have the whole data and build the whole block,” and said “it would be amazing to have distributed block building.” Third, he noted bluntly: “We don’t have a sharded mempool. We still need that.” Despite those caveats, Buterin called Fusaka “a fundamental step forward in blockchain design.” He argued that “the next two years will give us time to refine the PeerDAS mechanism, carefully increase its scale while we continue to ensure its stability, use it to scale L2s, and then when ZK-EVMs are mature, turn it inwards to scale ethereum L1 gas as well.” He closed by sending “big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen,” underscoring that for the Ethereum community, Fusaka is not a routine protocol update but the arrival of a long-promised sharding era on mainnet. At press time, ETH traded at $3,194.

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