The Berachain Foundation announced significant progress on an emergency hard fork designed to mitigate a vulnerability in its decentralized exchange, BEX, following a broader exploit that affected Balancer V2 pools and their forks across multiple blockchains.
In a statement posted on X late Monday, the foundation said that the hard fork binary has been distributed to validators, with many already completing the necessary upgrades.
The new binary prevents the movement of exploited tokens outside the network and blocks further attacks on Berachain.
“Prior to going live and producing blocks once again, we’d like to ensure that core infrastructure partners necessary for chain operations—such as oracles for liquidations, have updated their RPCs,” the foundation wrote. “At this point, they will be our main blocker to resuming liveness.”
Once these updates are completed, Berachain plans to coordinate with bridges, centralized exchanges, and custodians to restore full operational functionality.
The foundation also confirmed it is in communication with a MEV bot operator, identified as the current holder of the exploited BEX funds.
The operator, who has reportedly been active on Berachain for several months, has indicated he is a white-hat hacker and has agreed to pre-sign transactions to return the funds once the chain resumes normal operations.
According to Berachain, the recovered assets will be returned to the official deployer address (0xD276D30592bE512a418f2448e23f9E7F372b32A2). The deployer has also sent on-chain messages confirming that this process should be followed.
Following the chain’s relaunch, the foundation plans to release a detailed post-mortem report outlining new security measures implemented across BEX, other core applications, and the broader Berachain ecosystem.
The team emphasized that user safety and fund recovery remain top priorities, thanking the community for its support and patience as it works to restore normal operations and strengthen protocol resilience.