A Sincere Omission
Yesterday, OptiFi programmers made a costly mistake.
The OptiFi development team admitted on their official Twitter account that they had halted the OptiFi mainnet program permanently by mistake, losing almost $661,000 in USDC in the process.
Options trading can be done on Solana’s decentralized exchange, OptiFi. The post-mortem reveals that the team originally planned to upgrade the protocol on August 29, but the operation was scrapped due to deployment delays. However, they soon discovered that OptiFi had transferred a little over 17.2 SOL tokens (valued at around $533 at the time of writing) to a newly formed “buffer” account. The group attempted to get these tokens back by terminating the OptiFi initiative. The strategy succeeded, but when the team tried to reinstall, they received a notice saying the software had been disabled forever.
According to the investigation, the developers’ execution of the command line “solana program close” while attempting to obtain the tokens was the root cause. Yet, the OptiFi team evidently had no idea that the command “solana program close” would result in an immediate and irreversible end to the program. The developers requested that the Solana team update the Solana documentation to reflect the finality of the program close feature.
The OptiFi crew assured customers that any money they lost will be refunded to them within two weeks, adding that 95% of the frozen funds belonged to staff members. In addition, they assured OptiFi AMM contestants that they would still be announcing winners on September 5 despite the mix-up.
