> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.aeralend.app/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.aeralend.app/how-it-works/when-aera-pauses.md).
# When Aera pauses things
Aera needs one number to run: how much COOK one bCOOK is worth.
It is not a market price. bCOOK is staked COOK, so its value is **what the stake pool will redeem it for** — which the pool itself publishes and which cannot be moved by trading. Aera reads the pool directly. There is no price feed, no oracle committee and no aggregator.
A stake-pool rate should move slowly and in one direction. When it does not, Aera stops trusting it, holds the last rate it accepted, and pauses the actions that would add risk — rather than repricing every position in the book on a number that may be wrong.
## The states
| State | What it means | What still works |
| ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------- |
| **Healthy** | Nothing to report | Everything |
| **Bootstrapping** | The rate has been seen once and needs the next epoch to confirm it | Lending, repaying, locking collateral |
| **Borrow frozen** | The rate moved further in one epoch than the breaker allows | Lending, repaying, locking collateral |
| **Emergency** | Aera has stopped trusting the rate entirely | Lending, repaying, locking collateral |
A strip appears under the header when any of the last three is active, and every affected button is disabled with the reason attached.
## Repaying is never blocked
Read across the table: **every restricted state leaves repaying, lending and locking collateral open.**
That is a design rule, not an accident of the parameters. All three *reduce* the protocol's risk — repaying shrinks debt, lending adds liquidity, locking adds collateral. A protocol that stops you reducing your own risk during an incident is a trap, and the borrower who most needs to act is exactly the one it would trap.
What is held back is everything that adds risk: new borrowing, unlocking collateral, and — in an emergency only — withdrawing lent COOK.
{% hint style="info" %}
**Nothing is moved and nothing is lost when a breaker fires.** Aera holds the last rate it accepted and waits. Positions carry on; only the actions that would add risk are paused.
{% endhint %}
## How it clears
By itself. Bootstrapping clears when the next stake-pool epoch confirms the rate; a frozen or emergency state clears when a rate arrives that the breaker accepts. There is no button anyone presses to declare the incident over.
## The dependency this creates
Aera's collateral valuation trusts a stake pool program that somebody else can upgrade. The oracle records that program's deploy slot and upgrade authority when it is configured and checks them on every refresh, so a replacement is detected rather than silently trusted.
The dependency itself cannot be engineered away. If that pool is compromised, the number Aera values every position with is wrong. It is the single largest trust assumption in the system.
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