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The emergency council is a market-level authority stored on LendingMarket.emergency_council. It is intentionally limited to one-way, risk-reducing actions: the council can enable circuit breakers or set limits to zero, but it cannot restore normal operation, relax risk parameters, or change ownership and admin settings. The market owner sets or rotates the council via UpdateLendingMarketMode::UpdateEmergencyCouncil. Pairing a fast emergency-council multisig with a slower, timelocked lending_market_owner keeps incident response quick while routine changes stay deliberate.
Every council power is one-way. The council can only tighten (enable a breaker, zero a limit), never loosen. Only the lending_market_owner can reverse an emergency action.

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Market-level actions

When signing update_lending_market, the emergency council can:
  • Enable global emergency mode: UpdateEmergencyMode = true.
  • Disable all new borrowing at the market level: UpdateBorrowingDisabled = true.
  • Disable price-triggered liquidations: UpdatePriceTriggeredLiquidationDisabled = true.
It cannot set any of those flags back to false. Only the lending market owner can do that. Global emergency mode is broad: most user-facing instructions are guarded by emergency_mode_disabled, including refreshes, deposits, withdrawals, borrows, repays, liquidations, flash loans, obligation orders, rollover and fill flows, and queued-withdrawal flows.

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Reserve-level actions

When signing update_reserve_config, the emergency council can only make the following restrictive config changes: For all other reserve config modes, or for the opposite values above, the emergency council is not authorized. The lending market owner remains the fallback authority for normal reserve config changes, while global-admin-only reserve modes still require the global admin. Reserve emergency mode blocks most user operations involving that reserve. Refreshing a reserve in emergency mode does not update the oracle price and clears the saved price status instead. The reserve-level flag can still be enabled even if the market has been made immutable; disabling it requires the normal owner path.

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Not emergency council powers

The emergency council cannot:
  • Change the lending market owner, emergency council, global admin, proposer authority, or permissioning authority.
  • Disable global or reserve emergency mode after it was enabled.
  • Raise borrow, deposit, or LTV limits, or re-enable price usage or collateral usage.
  • Execute owner-only operations such as socialize_loss.
  • Bypass global-admin-only reserve config ownership for protocol fees, take rates, flash-loan fees, fixed-interest host fees, order execution fees, or cToken blocking.
Enabling emergency mode or zeroing a limit has effects the council cannot undo. Confirm the action on a multisig review before signing; reversing it requires the lending_market_owner.

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Code references

  • Market allowlist: programs/klend/src/handlers/handler_update_lending_market.rs
  • Reserve allowlist: programs/klend/src/lending_market/lending_operations.rs
  • Reserve emergency mode behavior: programs/klend/src/state/reserve.rs, programs/klend/src/lending_market/lending_checks.rs
  • Global emergency mode guard: programs/klend/src/utils/constraints.rs, programs/klend/src/lib.rs

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Reference