No way to access $160 million worth of Ether frozen in Parity wallets

The Ethereum network experienced an accidental hack last week that resulted in a number of Parity, multi-signature wallets getting locked. Ether funds present in these wallets are completely inaccessible, by both the hacker and the rightful owner. Parity released a statement on November 8th, addressing this issue and provided a list of affected accounts as well. “We are analyzing the situation and will release an update with further details shortly,” the statement read.

As promised, another statement was released by the company this past Monday. It detailed the exact inaccessible amount as $160 million, stored in 587 multi-signature wallets that were deployed after July 20th. Parity Technologies founder, Jutta Steiner, also made a statement. Steiner encouraged users to approach them, instead of believing media’s speculation, if they had concerns regarding their accounts. “We deeply regret the impact this situation is causing among our users and within the community,” she said.

The team continues to look for a way to unfreeze affected wallets by deploying a method that is widely accepted by users and developers alike. Per the report, they have not come up with a solution to this problem. One suggestion solution, called EIP156, was proposed last year by Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin. It is an approach to unblock funds in case of a hack or a lockdown. However, its implementation requires a hard fork, which majority of the Ethereum community is against.

Other than this, the statement does not offer much help to the wallets owners. Even after more than a week later, users neither have a way to access their money nor a final solution to look forward to. Parity’s reputation has notably suffered a lot too as the bug leading to this hack was present in their own code. The company went through a similar series of events earlier this year that had resulted in a theft of 150,000 Ethers, worth $30 million.

In Parity’s latest postmortem report released on Wednesday, the company states that they have temporarily ceased the issuance of multi-signature Parity wallets along, with a few other precautionary measures. However, an immediate solution has still not been devised for the actual unlocking of funds. Fortunately for the users, the recent hack does not include a case of theft as the funds, though inaccessible, are still stored in their respective wallets.