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 A...
