StakeWise, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has successfully recovered nearly $19.3 million of the funds stolen from Balancer earlier this week. This recovery marks a significant milestone following the security breach which drained over $100 million from Balancer’s vaults and liquidity pools. 5,041 osETH tokens were recovered through a contract call, reducing the stolen amount to $98 million, down from the initial $117 million. investigations revealed that the hacker converted liquid staking tokens (LSTs) into Ethereum, with more than half of the stolen funds already transferred to the network. The attack on November 3 targeted Balancer’s Version 2 vaults and liquidity pools, exploiting a flaw in the platform’s smart contracts during pool setup, allowing the hacker to control vault calls and make unauthorized swaps and balance changes within minutes. This breach exposed vulnerabilities in DeFi security practices, as similar issues have been observed in other trading platforms across the crypto industry. Balancer’s total value locked (TVL) plummeted after the attack, dropping from $442 million to $214.5 million within 24 hours of the incident, a significant reduction of more than half of its on-chain liquidity. Balancer’s native token, BAL, also experienced losses, falling by 8% during the same period. The global crypto market capitalization has been under pressure, dropping to a five-month low of $3.45 trillion, while Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum have declined by 18% and 27% respectively over the past month. In response to the attack, Balancer’s team announced collaboration with security researchers to investigate the incident. A 20% bounty has been offered for the safe return of the remaining funds, and a full report on the attack will be released once the investigation concludes. StakeWise’s recovery underscores Balancer’s progress in containing the damage from the exploit.