How A Solana-Based DEX Bricked Itself, Locking $500K+ In Funds

It’s not easy being a dev. In recent days, a young Solana-based DEX, OptiFi, faced an unexpected downfall after a simple coding error. The platform released an announcement that their mainnet program is now unrecoverable yesterday. The move has resulted in an unexpected shutdown for the DEX.

Let’s review what we know from the announcement and how something like this could be avoided in the future.

OptiFi’s Unexpected Shutdown

OptiFi was an options and derivatives focused decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Solana that was less than a year in the making. The platform touted Solana’s low latency transactions, portfolio margining and partial liquidation mechanisms. The platform also brought the “first-ever delta-neutral options AMM vault” on Solana that provided yield to depositors. So how did we get here? According to OptiFi’s full debrief, a code update that was moving to Solana mainnet saw a user error that resulted in the use of a ‘solana program close’ command, locking roughly $660K worth of USDC in OptiFi-stored funds in their AMM vault.

OptiFi has assured that user funds will be compensated (while noting that a large majority of the funds are from an internal team member), and a proposal on the Solana github is currently active to address the matter. OptiFi notes in their debrief of a “lesson we learned harshly:”

EVERY DEPLOYMENT NEEDS A RIGOROUS PROCESS AND SINGLE POINT FAILURE CAN BE AVOIDED. PLEASE DON’T RUSH LIKE WHAT WE DID, ESPECIALLY FOR DEFI PROJECTS.

Solana (SOL) has been an emerging player in NFTs and DeFi, despite occasional setbacks like this recent OptiFi debacle. | Source: SOL-USD on TradingView.com

Is It Still Solana Season?

Despite small network setbacks, Solana has still seen strong strides this year in both DeFi and NFT marketplaces. Across NFTs, Solana-based projects like DeGods and Okay Bears, among others, have helped spurred the network to a strangehold of the #2 spot (behind only top dog Ethereum). In the more relevant DeFi, Solana has largely outperformed last year to date metrics, according to DeFiLlama. This has been spurred by growing products like Solend, Serum and more. DeFiLlama has Solana listed as the #6 chain in order of total value locked (TVL), at just over $1B worth of funds.

Building and shipping products is rarely a small task, and this is no exception. It hurts to see ecosystem products, regardless of chain, fall to seemingly small errors, but it unfortunately is a byproduct of this world. Our team extends best wishes to the OptiFi builders as they move forward.

Featured image from Pexels, Charts from TradingView.com
The writer of this content is not associated or affiliated with any of the parties mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.