Hack history / 2020 / Hack or exploit
Balancer
Hack or exploit on Jun 28, 2020 · Incorrect Share Accounting
ATTACK TX CONFIRMED ON CHAINSOURCES AGREE ON DATE AND LOSS · 3 SOURCES
Lost
$500K
dollars at the time
Returned
none listed
as the sources state it
Rank
#1,161
among thefts by dollars lost
What happened
Balancer pools holding deflationary tokens (like STA which burns 1% per transfer) were exploited. An attacker used a dYdX flashloan to repeatedly trade between STA and ETH, depleting STA to 1 wei while Balancer's balance tracking failed to account for the fee burns. They extracted ETH, WBTC, LINK and SNX from severely imbalanced pools.
Details
- Date
- Jun 28, 2020
- Kind
- Hack or exploit
- Method
- Incorrect Share Accounting
- How in
- Smart contract bug
- Target
- DeFi protocol
- Chains
- Ethereum
Reported by
Related incidents
Balancer V1 2026 · Hack or exploit · $250K
Balancer V1 2026 · Hack or exploit · $234K
Balancer V2 2025 · Hack or exploit · $120.5M
Balancer V2 2023 · Hack or exploit · $238K
Balancer V2 2023 · Hack or exploit · $2M
Balancer V1 2026 · Hack or exploit · $234K
Balancer V2 2025 · Hack or exploit · $120.5M
Balancer V2 2023 · Hack or exploit · $238K
Balancer V2 2023 · Hack or exploit · $2M
Cite this page
SwanBluechip, "Balancer hack, Jun 28, 2020: $500K lost", Crypto hack history, https://swan-hack-tracker.pages.dev/history/i/htb959e7a9de/ (data as of 2026-10-31).