Update April 3, 11.12 UTC: Pavel Pavlov has provided a comment stating that the issue has been resolved.
A faulty smart contract on the liquid-staking platform Lido has resulted in approximately $24 million worth of tokenized staked Solana (stSOL) being unintentionally locked.
Lido on Solana, which previously allowed users to stake any amount of Solana (SOL) and receive a 5% yield, was discontinued in October 2023 due to financial unsustainability and low fees.
Until February, users had the option to unstake their Solana through a user-friendly front end. However, this option was also discontinued, leaving users with only the manual option of unstaking via Solana’s command line interface (CLI).
According to messages on Lido’s Discord channel in March, some users found the CLI too complicated to use. Solscan data shows that there is still approximately $24 million worth of stSOL in circulation across 31,588 holders.
Several users on Discord have complained about the complexity of the unstaking process, with some claiming that they encountered unknown errors despite following Lido’s instructions.
However, it appears that the issue may not be due to user error. Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator, the team behind Lido on Solana, revealed in a Discord message on March 30 that there was an issue with the smart contract’s withdrawal function.
Pavlov explained that the issue is suspected to be related to changes in the Rent-Exempt Split logic and that the current implementation uses the split function in the withdrawal process. He also mentioned that P2P has no control over the situation and is reaching out to the Lido DAO to potentially change the smart contract.
In an update on the Lido Solana Discord page, Pavlov stated that the P2P team has successfully fixed the issue and launched an updated maintainer bot. He informed users that stSOL can now be withdrawn using CLI and provided a link to an official guide for more information.
Pavlov mentioned that changing the smart contract is a complex and time-consuming process, so the technical team will coordinate with the Lido DAO on procedures and timelines. The team is also exploring alternative options that do not require changes to the smart contract.
Some users have suggested using the on-chain stability protocol Sanctum or Jupiter (which routes through Sanctum) to swap stSOL for SOL or other liquid staking tokens.
Lido Finance has not responded to a request for comment at this time.