Altura blames bank account freeze for delay in vault shutdown process

Altura has announced that the account holding the cash that is meant for the last round of payouts from its stablecoin vault has been temporarily restricted by the bank.

The DeFi yield protocol wrote, “The situation is entirely outside of our control, and there is no further action we can take until we receive an update from the bank,” which is a confirmation that the restriction is delaying a wind-down of its treasury that started in June.

What did Altura say happened?

Before the freeze, Altura had already lined up the final step, which was an over-the-counter (OTC) deal to swap the returned cash into $USDT, which would then go out to users. In a post to its followers, the team said the funds are in an Altura Bank account and were headed to an OTC partner when the account “has been temporarily restricted.”

Over £16.4 million is currently locked in the account while the bank completes an internal review based on screenshots that the protocol shared on X.

Altura said it has contacted the bank, stating that the bank has asked them to wait till they complete their review of the account.

Months of unwinding before the freeze

The restriction of the protocol’s bank accounts comes at the very end of a process that has crawled through the summer. Altura decided to close its vault in June and has been redeeming user capital as its underlying positions settle.

The team reported on July 15 that it has recovered $14.97 million with $6.95 million still outstanding. About a week later, it stated that $1 million in vault strategies remained to unwind, with completion expected soon after.

By July 23, CEO Ranveer Arora told users the protocol had received the full return of funds from its real-world asset partners and that the OTC conversion was the next and final move. Earlier, on June 25, Altura said transfers into its bank account were moving through JPMorgan Chase and pointed users to a new Proof of Reserves tab in its app, where each transfer could be tracked.

What set the wind-down in motion?

The decision to close traces back to a redemption rush. Over a single 24-hour stretch in June, Altura cleared more than 8.5 million $USDT in instant withdrawals before Arora announced the vault would wind down in an orderly way. He attributed the move to “sustained withdrawal demand and current market sentiment.”

The pressure arrived alongside trouble elsewhere in the yield-bearing stablecoin market. Main Street’s msUSD had slipped from its dollar peg after its proof-of-solvency provider walked away, and that stress spread to withdrawal-heavy protocols like Altura.

Altura said it never held any exposure to Main Street or its strategies and that its HyperEVM lending vault, the associated $USDT/AVLT market, and its borrowers were unaffected. Arora also pushed back at what he called misinformation and speculation, saying that unfounded narratives had fed the fear driving redemptions.

What are the numbers behind Altura’s vault?

Altura’s vault was built around stablecoin yield on HyperEVM, an Ethereum-linked network. At the time of the redemption rush, DefiLlama tracked about $32.36 million in total value locked for the protocol on Hyperliquid L1, with a single yield pool and an average annual return near 17.49%. The vault had earlier peaked at roughly $39 million.

Altura has not committed to a completion date. With the final purchase now waiting on the bank’s review rather than on settlement schedules, the timeline for the last payouts depends on when the account reopens.