‘Solana Program Close’ Or How to Delete a Project by Clicking a Button

Due to a developer error, a Solana based Dex project OptiFi lost $661 thousand. Funds are blocked.

There has never been such a thing and here it is again. Solana has suffered different losses almost every month this year. We have already written about the problems of Solana here, here, here and here. It is a pity that our wishes for the Solana developers to avoid problems, once again have fallen on deaf ears.

This time, OptiFi — the Solana-based decentralized exchange platform project suffered. On August 29, during the update of the Solana program code, OptiFi developers prescribed the command ‘solana program close’ and blocked $661 thousand. OptiFi stated this in their blog.

“On 29th August around 06:00 UTC, we had an update to our Solana program code, so our deployer tried to upgrade the OptiFi program on Solana mainnet. However we accidentally used the ‘solana program close’ command, resulting in our OptiFi program on mainnet being unfortunately closed. All user’s 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.”

The OptiFi developers were just trying to update their program. They did not imagine that the command ‘solana program close’ could lead to permanent removal of the program.

“Here it turned out that we didn’t really understand the impact and risk of this closing program command line. ‘solana program close’ is actually for closing the program permanently and sending the SOL tokens in the buffer account used by the program back to the recipient wallet.”

OptiFi developers apologized to users and promised to return all funds.

But, what is Solana’s fault? The fact that such a risky command does not require double confirmation. And the documentation does not pay enough attention to what ‘solana program close’ can lead to.

OptiFi asked Solana developers to add more warnings to the documentation for the ‘solana program close’ command, and also asked them to add a double confirmation for this command. We hope that the developers of Solana will implement these requirements and we continue to observe.