tBTC Bridge Restarts After Nine Days, Aave Reserve Still Frozen

Threshold Network said its tBTC bridge was running onchain again in a post timestamped 23:09 UTC on Sunday, nine days after it stopped minting and redemptions. Node operators are reconnecting on patched systems. The app still will not take new deposits, mints or redemptions, and Threshold named no date for that. Aave's tBTC reserve on Ethereum Core, frozen since 31 October, is frozen still. The backing has not moved through any of it: about 4,320 BTC in the bridge wallets against roughly 4,185 tBTC in circulation.

The flaw was in Linux, not in tBTC

Threshold's post of 1 November names CVE-2026-98432, a Linux kernel vulnerability that can allow remote code execution on unpatched servers, and says every tBTC node operator had either patched its servers or taken its node offline until a fixed kernel was available. It found no evidence the flaw had been used against a tBTC node. The pause went up at 22:35 UTC on 30 October, worded as a precaution. Red Hat's advisory rates the kernel flaw critical. Threshold cites no severity score of its own. Pausing a bridge while a patch goes out is a move this industry has made before.

Threshold also disclosed something unrelated. An operator reported an incident elsewhere in its own infrastructure that drained about 0.5 ETH from the Ethereum account its tBTC node uses for fees. That node was already offline, and no signing key material was reached, the operator said.

Two accounts give two halt dates

LlamaRisk, which prepared the Aave freeze, opens its governance post with "On 31 October 2026, Threshold Network issued a pre-emptive pause" and links a post timestamped 30 October. Cointelegraph, filing early Monday, dates the halt to 30 October and calls the pause nine days. CryptoSlate puts Aave's response on 31 October and the halt before it, undated. This desk went to the posts. They say 30 October and 8 November.

"The tBTC bridge has resumed onchain following the completion of security maintenance. Node operators are reconnecting on patched systems, and the bridge will return to full operation as more of them come back online," Threshold said in the Sunday night post.

The dollar figure keeps moving and nobody shows the arithmetic

Four published readings of the frozen reserve sit in the record and they do not reconcile. The Defiant had about $136.5 million supplied on 31 October, reading Aave's own reserve-overview page, and CryptoSlate carried $136 million. The Defiant then published $123.2 million on 6 November. Cointelegraph has about $120 million as of Monday morning. All four are dollar values over a bitcoin-priced asset, and bitcoin fell across those days, so part of the gap is price. How much of it, we could not establish, because no source publishes the tBTC price or the token count behind its own figure.

The only token-denominated readings come from the Aave forum, where a participant posting as SrAugust measured the reserve at 1,749.5 tBTC on 2 November and 1,744.7 a day later. Those are one forum member's own numbers, not the protocol's.

What the freeze does, and what is still undated

Less than the word suggests. A freeze stops new tBTC deposits and stops tBTC adding borrowing power to any position, LlamaRisk wrote on 31 October, while repayments and withdrawals still work and liquidations keep running. tBTC keeps its liquidation threshold, so no position became liquidatable because of the freeze. It applies to Ethereum Core alone. The Base and Arbitrum reserves had already been frozen in earlier asset-deprecation rounds, which left Ethereum Core as the only market where tBTC could still back new borrowing.

Threshold's own estimate already slipped once. On 6 November it expected operators to begin reconnecting from around 00:00 UTC on Saturday 7 November, and the restart post came about 47 hours after that. LlamaRisk said it would propose restorative measures once operations were back to normal, and has not posted in the thread since 31 October. A question put to it there on 2 November is still unanswered — whether the unfreeze turns on new redemption requests being accepted again, or on the bridge reopening in general. Until the interface returns, the exit from tBTC into bitcoin runs through secondary markets.