‘No indication that MetaMask wallets were affected’ – Joseph Lubin reassures users

The MetaMask team has made its third assurance that wallets and customer funds are safe and were not affected by the recently reported security incident.

The latest promise came from Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and founder of ConsenSys, the firm behind MetaMask. 

In an X post, Lubin said, 

Based on our investigation to date, there is no indication that MetaMask wallets or customer funds in wallets have been affected. You custody and control your own keys. That is how self-custody works. You are fully in control of your own money in MetaMask.

The incident was first reported on the 30th of September, and the team said they took precautionary measures, including taking their validators offline. 

In the second update, reported on the 1st of October, the team maintained that they’re continuing to “investigate and respond” to the incident that’s affecting “part of its infrastructure.”

Apart from validator exits, there have been few details on the security incident. 

Lubin’s Friday update is the third one. Responding to the limited report being shared, he said, 

We do not publicly discuss the details of an open incident, but we disclose promptly to partners and relevant stakeholders once an issue is sufficiently understood.

Impact on ETH’s staking market?

So far, there is speculation that the issue was with its validator infrastructure. And taking the validators offline reduced “residual operational risk” but did not expose the underlying ETH, according to Lubin. 

Lido had confirmed that it exited MetaMask validators, and it will take a while before re-entering the system.

Linea, an Ethereum L2 developed by ConsenSys, also announced a similar move. 

The affected validators supporting the Yield Boost vault are being exited as a precaution following the MetaMask Staking incident. The funds and control of the staking vault itself are unaffected.

The Linea update happened on the 2nd of October, further hinting that the security issue was linked to the MetaMask staking system. 

According to Ethereum researcher Kaden, about 17K validators have exited, translating to about 513K ETH total. He added that over 800 potentially impacted validators were yet to exit, as of 1st October. 

But Validator Queue data showed about 10,500 validators exited over the period (from 884K to 873K). This translates to about 336K ETH, and this is an overall figure that may not entirely be linked to MetaMask exits.   

The queued ETH waiting for exit (red) jumped 3x from 205K ETH to 773K ETH by October 1st. It surged to 850K ETH a day later, underscoring a spike that was likely tied to the MetaMask incident. However, ETH price remained unaffected and consolidated below $2.8K during the period. 

Final Summary

• Customer funds are not affected by the MetaMask security incident, per Joseph Lubin.
• ETH awaiting to exit staking quadrupled to +800K ETH amid the incident.