[Bitcoin Now] Ethereum Plunges After $100 Million Hacking Incident

Some Stolen Assets Recovered

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, plunged sharply following a hacking incident involving over $100 million.

According to CoinMarketCap, a digital asset market data site, Ethereum was trading at $3,628 as of 9:45 a.m. on November 4, down 6.64% from 24 hours earlier. The price dropped to as low as $3,560 during the day before rebounding slightly. Compared to this year’s high of $4,953 on August 25, the price has fallen by more than 26%.

The sudden drop in Ethereum’s price appears to be due to a hacking attack on the cryptocurrency protocol Balancer, which resulted in the theft of more than $100 million in digital assets. Bloomberg reported that security firms PeckShield and Cyvers detected the incident and issued warnings, estimating the losses to be over $128 million (approximately 190 billion won).

Balancer also acknowledged the hack via its social networking service account on X (formerly Twitter), stating, “We are aware of the hack. Our engineering and security teams are investigating as a top priority.”

Balancer is a DeFi (decentralized finance) protocol that enables peer-to-peer transactions, lending, and deposits without a central authority by directly connecting users.

Deddy Lavid, CEO of the security firm Cyvers, explained that the hack was likely caused by a breach in the protocol’s access control mechanism, allowing the attacker to directly manipulate balances.

However, it appears that some of the stolen assets have been recovered. Balancer reshared a post on X stating that the StakeWise decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) team executed transactions to recover a significant portion of the assets stolen in the hack.

The recovered assets total $20.7 million, consisting of 5,041 osETH (approximately $19 million) and 13,495 osGNO (approximately $1.7 million). Of these, only 73.5% of the stolen osETH was recovered, as the hacker quickly converted some to Ethereum, while all of the osGNO was retrieved. The recovered assets will be returned to the victims of the hack and distributed according to users’ balance ratios prior to the incident.