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Temporary pause on new Stylus activations

The Arbitrum Security Council has temporarily paused new Stylus contract activations on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova as a security measure. To date, all Stylus findings from contracts that have been reviewed have only posed a denial-of-service risk to chain liveness and no user funds have been at risk.

What this means for you
  • You cannot activate new or expired Stylus contracts on Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Nova while the pause is in effect.
  • Already activated Stylus contracts keep running until they expire. Calling them remains permissionless.
  • You can renew an active Stylus contract before it expires with the keepalive mechanism.
  • Solidity and EVM contract deployment and execution are unaffected.

To learn why the Security Council took this action, read the forum post Security Council Emergency Action – 2/10/2026.

What is paused​

The pause applies to the activation step only. Activation is the step that makes a Stylus contract callable. To learn how deployment and activation work, refer to Activation.

  • You cannot activate a new Stylus contract. You also cannot reactivate a Stylus contract that has expired.
  • Stylus contracts that are active keep running until they expire. An activation lasts 365 days by default. To read the time left, call programTimeLeft.
  • You can renew an active Stylus contract before it expires. Call codehashKeepalive. By default, the contract must be at least 31 days old.

What comes next​

We remain confident in Stylus, which lets chain owners customize their networks and developers optimize key contracts. The Arbitrum Foundation will work with the ArbitrumDAO on next steps for reopening activations in a way that preserves these uses while restricting hand-crafted WASM programs.