OptiFi, a decentralized options exchange using the Solana blockchain, inadvertently disabled its mainnet service with a misunderstood command and locked up some $661,000 worth of USDC ‘digital dollar’ tokens.
The cryptocurrency assets cannot be recovered, OptiFi said, so the plan is to manually refund affected users. Isn’t technology marvelous.
“On 29th August around 0600 UTC, we had an update to our Solana program code, so our deployer tried to upgrade the OptiFi program on Solana mainnet,” the crypto entity said in its postmortem analysis of the incident.
“However we accidentally used the ‘solana program close’ command, resulting in our OptiFi program on mainnet being unfortunately closed. All users’ funds and open positions on OptiFi locked in PDAs, $661K in total (AMM vault, user account…) and it’s not recoverable at the moment of writing.”
Essentially, this command closed an OptiFi financial program with a specific identifier and “all the users’ margin accounts, USDC tokens, option tokens, and AMMs USDC vaults are locked in where they are, because they are using PDAs [program derived accounts], which are bound to [the closed identifier].”
The irreversibility of cryptocurrency transactions – a key selling point for some – turns out to be not such a benefit for those unfairly deprived of funds.
Fortunately, for outsiders at least, 95 percent of the lost funds are said to belong to an OptiFi team member. So the entity is on the hook – voluntarily rather than due to any legal obligation – for only about $33,000.
OptiFi doesn’t…
