Around $24 million worth of tokenised staked Solana (stSOL) remains inadvertently locked on the liquid-staking platform Lido due to a malfunctioning smart contract.
Lido on Solana, which allowed users to stake any amount of Solana for a 5% yield, ceased operations in October 2023 due to financial sustainability issues and low fees.
Despite the closure, users had until February to unstake their Solana through a user-friendly interface, which was subsequently deactivated, leaving manual unstaking via Solana's command line interface (CLI) as the only option.
However, some users found the CLI too complex, leading to difficulties in the unstaking process.
Complaints on Lido's Discord channel revealed frustration among users, with many encountering unknown errors despite following provided instructions.
However, recent insights suggest that user errors may not be the sole cause.
Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator, the team behind Lido on Solana, disclosed in a 30 March Discord message that the withdrawal function's smart contract had encountered an issue.
He pointed out that:
"It is suspected to be associated with alterations in the Rent-Exempt Split logic. The current implementation uses the split function in the withdrawal process of the smart contract."
Despite acknowledging the problem, P2P lacks control over the situation and is now in communication with the Lido DAO to address the smart contract issue.
An updated maintainer bot has been launched, enabling stSOL withdrawals through the CLI, with users directed to an official guide for assistance.
"Changing the smart contract is quite significant in terms of complexity and time. So, the technical team will reach out to Lido DAO and sync up on procedures and timelines."
Additionally, the team is exploring alternative solutions that do not require changes to the smart contract.
"I can imagine how disappointing this news may be, but sadly, there are no ETAs available at this moment. As stated earlier, the team is fully committed and diligently exploring multiple avenues for resolution."
Meanwhile, some users recommend utilising the on-chain stability protocol Sanctum or Jupiter to exchange stSOL for SOL or other liquid staking tokens.