• Balancer V2 suffers a $110m exploit.

• EF ESP team reopens grant applications.

• S-two prover launches on Starknet.

• ZKP2P releases V3.

Balancer, an AMM protocol and pioneer of the 80/20 weighted pool design, suffered a smart contract exploit on November 3, 2025, at 7:48 AM UTC, resulting in over $110 million in assets being drained from its V2 Composable Stable Pools and Balancer V2 forks. The hack impacted multiple chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain. The majority of stolen assets consist of WETH and liquid staking tokens (LSTs) like wstETH, osETH, and rETH. Launched in 2021, Balancer V2 introduced a singleton Vault for enhanced capital efficiency. Balancer V2 underwent multiple audits by OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, and Certora. Balancer V3, deployed in December 2024, and non-composable V2 pools remain unaffected. Balancer V2 users should immediately withdraw funds and revoke token approvals.

The Balancer V2 exploit triggered various responses across affected chains and protocols to mitigate damage and freeze stolen funds. Balancer immediately paused all pausable V2 Composable Stable Pools and entered recovery mode, isolating the issue to legacy V2 infrastructure. Berachain coordinated validators for an emergency hard fork, blacklisted attacker addresses, and recovered assets from compromised pools. Sonic activated a new onchain account freeze mechanism to lock the attacker’s wallet without a hard fork, pausing affected pools. Downstream protocols like Beefy and YieldFi paused V2 integrations. Security teams from PeckShield, Nansen, and BlockSec are tracing funds, with some already blacklisted on exchanges.

The Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) has reopened grant applications for Ethereum builders with a new model featuring two main grant tracks: Wishlist grants and Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Wishlist grants target broad areas of opportunity and high-level goals for the Ethereum ecosystem. RFP grants outline specific problems or opportunities with defined deliverables, timelines, and expected outcomes. ESP had paused open grants earlier to reassess priorities and ensure funding aligns more closely with the Ethereum Foundation’s strategic goals. Builders can now apply for grants across domains like cryptography, privacy, application development, security, and community growth.

StarkWare launched S-two, its next-gen open-source ZK prover written in Rust, on Starknet. S-two now proves every Starknet block, delivering 100x faster proofs and over 90% in cost reduction compared to its predecessor, Stone. The prover leverages Circle STARK technology and supports both Cairo and direct AIR definitions. S-two enables client-side proving on low-powered devices such as smartphones, supporting scalable privacy-preserving applications. It eliminates proving bottlenecks, allows anyone to sequence and prove transactions, and removes single points of failure. Future releases will include further cost optimizations.

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