Solana DEX OptiFi Accidentally Shuts Itself Down, Locks Up $661,000

Decentralized options exchange OptiFi, a project on the Solana blockchain, has come to an unexpected halt after its development team accidentally shut down the mainnet and locked up funds during an attempted upgrade.

An Honest Mistake

OptiFi developers made an expensive blunder yesterday.

OptiFi’s development team stated from their official Twitter account that they had accidentally permanently closed the OptiFi mainnet program, locking approximately $661,000 of USDC away. 

OptiFi is a decentralized exchange on Solana that allows users to trade options. According to the post-mortem, the team attempted to upgrade the protocol on August 29 but aborted the operation when the deployment took longer than expected. Yet 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 closing down the OptiFi program to enable the retrieval of these tokens. The maneuver worked: unfortunately, however, when the team attempted to redeploy, an error message indicated the program had been shut down permanently.

According to the post-mortem, the culprit was the command line “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 Solana documentation in order to warn developers of the irrevocable nature of the program 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 reimbursed within approximately two weeks. They also stated that participants of the OptiFi AMM contest had not been affected by the blunder and that winners would still be announced on September 5.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.