Aave V2 has paused its markets on Ethereum and frozen certain assets on Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism after reports of an issue with a feature on the protocol.

Aave, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol, has paused its markets on multiple chains after a report of an issue with the protocol.

In an X update on Saturday, the Aave team said that its community of developers had validated a “report of an issue on a certain feature of the Aave protocol” and the community-elected group of individuals called Aave Guardian had taken prevention measures to mitigate risks.

– Pause the Aave V2 Ethereum Market
– Pause certain assets on Aave V2 on Avalanche
– Freeze certain assets on Aave V3 on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism

— Aave (@aave) November 4, 2023

Aave Guardian paused Aave V2 on Ethereum and paused certain assets on Avalanche, while freezing certain assets on Aave V3 on Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism.

During this pause, users will be able to manage existing positions and withdraw assets but won’t be able to initiate new positions, borrow or deposit funds. 

The team noted that no funds were at risk and a governance proposal to restore the normal operations of the protocol will be submitted shortly, with a more detailed postmortem of the issue at hand to come. 

“Yesterday, on a Saturday morning, the Aave community received a report of a niche issue regarding the protocol. Within hours measures were taken to mitigate the risk, resolve a patch, review and deploy the first proposal. Incident management at the best,” wrote  Aave founder Stani Kulechov in an X post.

According to a post on Aave’s governance forum, the paused chains were identified to be the targets of the attack vector. The team said it does not believe it would be appropriate to disclose details surrounding the reported vulnerability given that multiple forks of Aave have been created, but any efforts to exploit would be mitigated by disabling the stable rate borrowing mode.

🚨🚨 🚨 On 11-04 17:38:35 UTC, Aave Guardian has taken necessary protection measurements to pause AaveV2 protocol (and all Aave pools are safe): https://t.co/3xJzfiejig

Given the protocol is “forked” by multiple third parties and the exact details are not disclosed yet, it is… pic.twitter.com/OkO1EZv6pW

— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) November 4, 2023

At the time of writing, Aave’s native token AAVE appeared to be unaffected by news of the vulnerability, and was trading at around $89, down just 0.33% over the last 24 hours.