Glossary
Parity Multisig Freeze (2017)
The November 2017 incident where a user accidentally killed a library contract that the Parity multisig wallet depended on — permanently freezing ~513,774 ETH.
In November 2017, a user calling themselves "devops199" stumbled
into Parity's multisig wallet library contract and called its
initWallet function to take ownership, then called kill —
triggering SELFDESTRUCT on the library. Every Parity multisig
deployed afterward had its logic pointing to a now-empty address,
freezing all funds.
Approximately 513,774 ETH were rendered permanently inaccessible — worth roughly $300M at the time and several billion dollars at later peaks. Multiple recovery attempts failed; the funds remain frozen. The incident is a permanent reference for the importance of constructor checks and access control on deployed libraries.