Parity’s recent call for a vote on their submitted EIP-999, which would allow for affected users to regain access to their assets stored in the multisig wallet, caused a stir within the Ethereum community, even prompting Vitalik Buterin himself to call for a boycott of Consensus 2018, stating “sensationalist” coverage of EIP-999 as part of the reason.
The situation started with the July 2017 Parity hack, which resulted in the loss of 150,000 Ethereum (ETH). Parity fixed the vulnerability in the code, but unfortunately the redeployed smart contract code came with yet another vulnerability. This new vulnerability was accidentally exploited by a Parity user in Nov. 2017, causing over 513,774 ETH held in 587 different wallets to be frozen.