Balancer says $2.8M still at risk after vulnerability warning

Ethereum automated market maker and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer warned that $2.8 million, or 0.42% of its total value locked (TVL), remains at risk following the discovery of a vulnerability on Aug. 22.

According to the Aug. 24 announcement, users are asked to “withdraw ASAP” if they have connected wallets to affected liquidity provider pools (LPs). A personal user interface was established via the protocol’s website to determine if user funds were at risk, which then suggests to unstake, withdraw, and unwrap the affected tokens.

Selected at-risk assets include those on the Balance mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, Gnosis, Fantom, and zK-EVM.

On the day of discovery, Balancer said 4% of its $669 million TVL was affected after developers mitigated 80% of the critical vulnerability. In an Aug. 23 update, Balance said that the vulnerability had not been exploited, but at the time, $5.6 million worth of funds remained at risk. Developers stated: 

“We believe funds in the mitigated pools (labeled “mitigated”) are safe, but nevertheless strongly recommend timely migration to safe pools, or withdrawal. Pools that could not be mitigated are labeled “at risk.” If you are an LP in any of these pools, please exit immediately.”

Cointelegraph reported on June 2 that Balance had launched on Ethereum layer-2 network Optimism. Balancer Labs CEO Fernando Martinelli said the Optimism deployment reflects his belief that layer-2 scaling solutions will be effective in reducing transaction fees and network congestion. At the time, there were a total of 38 projects building on the Optimism network.

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