Taiko pauses block production after exploit, urges withdrawals

Taiko, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, paused block production after detecting an exploit and asked users to withdraw tokens from Taiko-controlled smart contracts and associated bridges. The core team announced the pause and said engineers and security partners are investigating a vulnerability that could affect user funds.

Block proposers stopped producing new blocks to prevent further transactions from being included while the team analyzes the attack vector. Taiko advised users to move assets back to the Ethereum mainnet or to other secure storage and to avoid new deposits or interactions with Taiko contracts until the review is complete.

Decentralized applications and liquidity providers operating on Taiko may experience delayed or failed transactions and pending operations could be affected. The project warned that withdrawal processing times could vary depending on network congestion and the progress of the investigation.

Developers building on Taiko were instructed to suspend new deployments, inspect smart contracts for abnormal behavior, and preserve logs and system data to support the investigation. The team said it will work with external security auditors and may publish a post-mortem after technical assessments finish.

In initial communications, the core team did not disclose details about the attacker, the amount of funds affected, or a timeline for restoring normal block production. The project said it will provide updates through official Taiko channels as it gathers more information.

Taiko is designed to be compatible with Ethereum smart contracts and developer tools, using zero-knowledge proofs to compress transaction data and settle state on Ethereum. Layer 2 networks move computation off-chain to lower fees and increase throughput while relying on on-chain settlement, a design that requires coordination across off-chain components and on-chain mechanisms.