Mind the Rounding Error — and Who’s Driving the Ferrari?
The world of DeFi had a bit of a growing-up moment recently. The decentralised finance (DeFi) protocol Balancer suffered a catastrophic exploit that reportedly saw over USD 100 million disappear into the digital ether. The culprits didn’t brute-force the system or crack the code. They exploited a rounding error — a tiny, almost invisible vulnerability in Balancer’s “Stable Pools.” By skimming micro-gains across thousands of transactions, they siphoned off fractions of cents that quickly added...