Balancer: decentralised exchanges rating breakdown
13 chains
It is on this page as the category’s cautionary evidence rather than as a recommendation. Balancer’s weighted-pool design was one of the most genuinely original ideas in DeFi and one of the most heavily audited codebases in it — and on 3 November 2025 an attacker turned accumulated rounding error in its Composable Stable Pools into roughly $128m.
It is on this page as the category’s cautionary evidence rather than as a recommendation. Balancer’s weighted-pool design was one of the most genuinely original ideas in DeFi and one of the most heavily audited codebases in it — and on 3 November 2025 an attacker turned accumulated rounding error in its Composable Stable Pools into roughly $128m.
How the score is built
Each criterion is scored 0–10 and weighted. The median column is the middle score across every entry in this ranking, so a row reads as a position rather than a number.
| Criterion | What we measured | Weight | Score | Category median | Rank | Weighted gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Has it been drained, and did anyone get paid back? | — | 30% | 1 | 5 | 9 of 9 | -1.20 |
| What traders actually paid | 0.0905 what traders actually paid · computed · 2026-08-27 · source | 25% | 8 | 7 | 2 of 9 | +0.25 |
| Depth and volume | $65m total value locked · sourced · 2026-08-27 · source$224m 30-day volume · sourced · 2026-08-27 · source | 25% | 2 | 7 | 8 of 9 | -1.25 |
| Chains and assets | — | 12% | 7 | 6 | 4 of 9 | +0.12 |
| How hard the capital works | — | 8% | 4 | 7 | 6 of 9 | -0.24 |
Measured 27 August 2026 · weights and method · decided by depth and volume, worth -1.25 points against the median
Has it been drained, and did anyone get paid back?: 1/10
Contract exploits with dates, amounts and — the question every other comparison skips — whether users were actually made whole. A DEX is a set of contracts holding pooled money, so this is the first question, not the fifth. Audit count is recorded but never scored on its own: Balancer V2 was among the most audited contract systems in DeFi and lost $128m to a rounding error in November 2025.
Scored 1 of 10 against a category median of 5, which places it 9th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 30% weight that is 1.20 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 9, the worst 1.
What traders actually paid: 8/10
Computed by us, not read off a fee-tier page: thirty days of protocol fees divided by thirty days of volume, per venue, from public data. That single division exposes what routing, tier mix and pool design really cost, and it disagrees with the advertised tiers everywhere. It is not the whole cost of a trade — slippage and gas sit on top — but it is the part every comparison misstates.
Scored 8 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 2nd of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 25% weight that is 0.25 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 1.
Depth and volume: 2/10
Total value locked and thirty-day volume, both from public data at a stated timestamp. Depth is what decides slippage on a real trade, and volume is what proves the depth is usable rather than parked.
Scored 2 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 8th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 25% weight that is 1.25 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 2.
Chains and assets: 7/10
The number of chains where the venue is actually deployed, weighted by whether volume genuinely flows there. A deployment on forty chains that trades on two is coverage on paper.
Scored 7 of 10 against a category median of 6, which places it 4th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 12% weight that is 0.12 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 2.
How hard the capital works: 4/10
Thirty-day volume divided by total value locked — how many times each dollar of liquidity turned over. Nobody publishes this, and it separates a venue whose pools are genuinely used from one sitting on idle incentive-farmed capital. It also predicts fee income per dollar of risk taken by liquidity providers.
Scored 4 of 10 against a category median of 7, which places it 6th of 9 among decentralised exchanges on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is 0.24 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 3.
Its nearest neighbours in this ranking
Incidents priced into this score
- 2025-11-03 — Batched swaps drove token balances to rounding boundaries in Composable Stable Pools, accumulating precision loss into invariant manipulation. Roughly $128m left across Balancer V2 and its forks. About $19.3m of osETH was recovered by StakeWise and roughly $8m more by white-hat action; the remainder was not returned, and the DAO proposed repaying a fraction of the loss. [users made whole: no] [source]
Questions about this score
What happened in the Balancer hack of November 2025?
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An attacker exploited how Composable Stable Pools handle very small swaps: pushing token balances to specific rounding boundaries causes precision loss, and batching those swaps accumulated the error into invariant manipulation worth roughly $128m across Balancer V2 and its forks. About $19.3m of osETH was recovered by StakeWise and roughly $8m more by white-hats. Most of it was not returned.
Does the Balancer exploit mean audits are worthless?
+
It means audits are not a safety guarantee, which is a narrower and more useful claim. Balancer was among the most reviewed codebases in DeFi and the flaw was a mathematical property of the pool implementation rather than a missing check that a reviewer would flag. We record audit counts on these pages and score incident history separately, precisely so the first is never read as evidence about the second.
Is Balancer usable now?
+
It is operating, its realised fee rate of 0.0905% is genuinely low, and its TVL of $65m tells you what the market concluded. We include it as the category's cautionary evidence rather than as a recommendation: read the incident, then decide whether being early on an original design is a trade you want to make twice.