Arbitrum suspends new Stylus contract activation: responding to AI-assisted attack risks

According to the Arbitrum Security Committee report, in response to the increasingly complex risks of AI-assisted attacks, Arbitrum took emergency action around 23:30 Beijing time on October 2 to temporarily halt the activation of new Stylus contracts on the Arbitrum One and Nova networks.

This restriction mainly targets programs and application updates that require new activation, while already activated Stylus applications can continue to operate, and the deployment and execution of regular Solidity contracts are not affected. Arbitrum officials stated that this preventive measure stems from threats of WebAssembly program attacks targeting non-standard Stylus compiler toolchains, and no risk of fund theft has been discovered so far. The main concerns are on-chain activity and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Developers can still extend the lifecycle of existing programs through a permissionless keep-alive renewal mechanism, but they cannot activate expired programs or new version applications.