Gnosis Chain Executes Hard Fork to Recover Funds Linked to Balancer Exploit

Gnosis Chain said its community of node operators has executed a hard fork to recover funds linked to the Balancer exploit. This week, Gnosis confirmed that the assets are now out of the attacker’s control and urged remaining operators to update their nodes to avoid penalties.

It has not yet specified the exact total amount of funds recovered.

Validator-Approved Hard Fork

In a post on X, the network said the decision was taken by operators following weeks of discussion after the November hack of decentralized exchange and automated market maker, Balancer, which resulted in the loss of almost $120 million in digital assets across multiple chains.

The hard fork follows an earlier emergency soft fork adopted by a majority of validators in November that restricted bridge movements and froze stolen funds on Gnosis Chain. According to Gnosis, the hard fork was required to move those frozen assets and enable their recovery.

The Balancer exploit was later traced to a vulnerability in Balancer V2 Composable Stable Pools, despite the protocol having undergone 11 audits by four different security firms. On-chain data revealed that the attacker had moved large amounts of staked Ether to new wallets shortly after the breach.

Balancer later said that white hat hackers were able to recover about $28 million, though most of the stolen assets initially remained inaccessible. Gnosis Chain was among the networks affected, and roughly $9.4 million in stolen funds were frozen on-chain through the soft fork.

Mixed Responses From the Community

Philippe Schommers, Gnosis’s head of infrastructure, had said earlier this month that a hard fork would be necessary to return those funds to users, while adding that node operators who failed to follow the majority chain would face penalties. He also said the team’s priority was to enable recovery before the end of December.

The move sparked debate within the community. Supporters argued that coordinated intervention showed accountability and a commitment to user protection, while critics warned that such actions could undermine the principle of immutability and called for clearer rules governing future interventions.

Some community members said that the soft fork had already altered the chain’s history, which makes the hard fork a continuation of that decision, while others pushed for a formal framework to define when similar actions would be justified.

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