Lido staked SOL holders fret as $24M remains stuck on ‘broken’ contract

As much as $24 million in tokenized staked Solana (stSOL) has been unintentionally locked on the liquid-staking platform Lido due to a faulty smart contract. 

Lido on Solana — which once let users effectively stake any amount of Solana (SOL) for a 5% yield — was sunset in October last year due to unsustainable financials and low fees.

Until February, users had been given the option to unstake their Solana through a user-friendly front end — but that too was sunset, leaving them with only the option of manually unstaking via Solana’s command line interface (CLI).

The CLI has proven to be too complicated for some users, according to messages on Lido’s Discord channel in March. Solscan data shows there’s as much as $24 million worth of stSOL still in circulation across 31,588 holders.

Some on Discord have complained the process was too complicated for the “layman,” while others claim they’ve run into unknown errors despite following instructions provided by Lido on So. 

“Cannot unstake stSol because none of the 2 solutions provided on the Lido site actually works,” user ericxtang wrote in the Discord channel on March 15.

“I tried unstaking StSOL about a month ago, but it’s still stuck with a validator and never went back to SOL, despite being [burned]” another user, “Number9guy,” wrote.

It turns out the issue may not be the result of user error after all.

In a March 30 Discord message, Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P Validator — the team once behind Lido on Solana — revealed there was an issue with the smart contract behind the withdrawal function.

“It is suspected to be associated with alterations in the Rent-Exempt Split logic,” Pavlov said. “The current implementation uses the split function in the withdrawal process of the smart contract.”

Pavlov added while the issue has been identified, P2P also has “no levers of influence in the situation” and it’s now reaching out to the Lido DAO to potentially change the smart contract.

Related: Former LDO holder files class-action lawsuit against Lido DAO for crypto losses

“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.”

The team is also looking into options to explore workarounds that do not require changes in the smart contract, he wrote.

“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 suggest using on-chain stability protocol Sanctum or Jupiter (which routes through Sanctum) to swap stSOL for SOL or other liquid staking tokens.

Lido Finance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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