Crypto Developer Enters Wrong Command, Destroys Entire Company

It must be a bad day for the staff at the decentralized finance platform OptiFi. Why? Due to a coding error, the Solana blockchain-based platform was permanently shut down, wiping out $661k in USDC.

"We are deeply sorry for the program incident that led to the abrupt closure of the OptiFi mainnet program, and we were not able to recover it," the company wrote in a blog post. "All users' funds will be refunded, and we will ensure that it does not again happen."

A blockchain-based financial transaction without an intermediary is called DeFi. DeFi is associated with several risks, including rug pulls and fraud, but this is the first time a programming error has resulted in a total loss of customer assets. It's a massive and expensive oversight that perfectly illustrates the risks of carrying out financial transactions without any intermediary authorities.

One of the company's developers tried to update the program on the Solana blockchain on August 29 and accidentally used a command that shut everything down. USDC worth over half a million dollars are now "not recoverable at the time of writing."

An OptiFi representative stated, "For a company like OptiFi, it's the worst-case scenario. We immediately searched the relevant thread on Solana discord. Also, We asked a core developer from Solana, but the answers we got indicate that we cannot re-deploy our program to the old program ID anymore." —Crypto Weekly