Due to a security vulnerability within Parity’s code — one of the largest Ethereum clients — over $150 million worth of user funds have been frozen and are unable to be accessed.

According to an alert issued by Parity Technologies yesterday (November 7th), the vulnerability was discovered within the standard multi-signature (multi-sig) wallet update that was deployed on July 20th (A wallet multi-sig feature increases security by requiring more than one key to initiate and broadcast Ethereum transactions).

The vulnerability itself was discovered yesterday by a client developer that goes by the name “devops199,” who “accidentally” deleted a code libarary for the Parity wallet, and then reported it on Github.

devops199 then tweeted:

In consequence of devops199’s “mistake”, all wallets utilizing the company’s multi-signature function became frozen, leaving thousands of users completely unable to access their funds — an estimated amount of over $152 million.

On top of this, several startups and open-source projects that recently launched initial coin offerings (ICOs) have come forward, claiming that their 151 wallet addresses have been affected by the software failure.

As expected, this event has placed a considerable amount of attention on Parity Technologies, which also lost $30 million of Ether in July due to a hack.