Solana DEX OptiFi accidentally shuts down, unlocks $661,000
Important takeaways
- The OptiFi team says they accidentally shut down the OptiFi program on Solana’s main network yesterday during a routine upgrade.
- The shutdown resulted in a loss of $661,000 in funds, most of which was from team members.
- OptiFi has promised to make its users whole within the next two weeks.
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Decentralized options exchange OptiFi, a project on the Solana blockchain, has halted unexpectedly after the development team accidentally shut down the mainnet and locked up funds during an attempted upgrade.
An honest mistake
OptiFi developers made a costly mistake yesterday.
OptiFi’s development team tired from their official Twitter account that they had accidentally permanently shut down the OptiFi mainnet program, locking away about $661,000 USDC.
OptiFi is a decentralized exchange on Solana that allows users to trade options. according to after death, the team attempted to upgrade the protocol on August 29, but aborted the operation when the deployment took longer than expected. However, they quickly realized that a new “buffer” account had indeed been created and that OptiFi had already transferred a little more than 17.2 SOL tokens to it (worth about $533 at the time of writing). The team tried to shut down the OptiFi program to enable the retrieval of these tokens. The maneuver worked: Unfortunately, when the team attempted to redeploy, an error message indicated that the program was permanently closed.
According to the autopsy, the culprit command line was “solana program close”, which the developers executed as part of their attempt to retrieve the tokens. However, and apparently unbeknownst to the OptiFi team, “solana program close” has the effect of closing the program permanently and irretrievably. The developers appealed to Solana developers to make changes to the Solana documentation to warn developers about the irreversible nature of the program’s close function.
The OptiFi team said that 95% of the locked funds belonged to team members and that all losses incurred by users would be refunded within about two weeks. They also stated that the participants in the OptiFi AMM contest had not been affected by the bug and that the winners will still be announced on September 5th.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.
