Abstract:

This is an explanation of the bug I experienced using the Synthetix perps v2 alpha. In short, something caused the wrong position to be opened and then I was prevented from closing the position for an extended period of time causing me to lose a lot of funds.

The total loss was approximately $2300. I was able to finally close the position, with 1730 sUSD remaining.

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The wallet address for this issue is: 0x09a2910DeD61DEB9Bd252F942F02FCB7225c8042

With a little over 4,000 sUSD of collateral and the market moving I figured I would enter a long. So I went to decentrex, clicked 25x and max longed.


I attempted to open a long with all my collateral at 25x. That is the long position you can see above. 96,225 / 25 gives you my collateral that I entered the trade with, post fees.

However, as you can see in the screen shot, my long was not processed correctly and somehow, incorrectly, a short position got opened for the exact same amount, with my long just sitting there pending.

Having tried to close the positions on kwenta and decentrex, I got these popups on the front end that I did not understand:


So, at 6:38 pm US Eastern time, I messaged this in SNX fundamentals:


At the time I just thought it was a frontend issue since they had been acting buggy (slow to open close txns), and that all was well.

I returned around 7:45 US eastern and saw that the issue had not been fixed, and that the frontends claimed I was deeply under water. This is when I frantically started panicking, and reached out to Cavalier in DMs. Throughout the troubleshooting session, price moved against my bugged position and I couldn't close it.

Somehow that I still don't understand, I was able to withdraw 120 sUSD and 180 sUSD in two separate transactions, clicking "withdraw max" in the kwenta front end both times in quick succession. This is weird behaviour, because these funds should have been included in my position that was opened, based on the size of the long position I had tried to open (which incorreclty opened as a short). I don't know where this 300 sUSD came from at this point, as my position was still open. This is consistent with my discord DMs in the group chat with cavalier and rasputincat.

The transactions, Respectively:

https://optimistic.etherscan.io/tx/0x3ec9dcce7f6b60da7356e982df02b8446b40aa351455624c9e42e164e157a98b

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x660187483a1bab214a73b6bdf447a6ac2135329f7401b5d54ca456c56a39c0bf

While working through the issue with Cavalier and rasputinCat the frontends started acting even weirder. Decentrex somehow showed another short as being open that I did not open, of the same size but new entry price. When it did finally close I didn't receive any of the profit displayed, which would have somewhat padded my losses.


At this point, tons of weird stuff was happening. I dont even know what to make of it now, but here is a weird screen shot from kwenta I shared with cavalier and rasputincat:


How could I have a realized loss of that amount -- without even having that much in my account -- and then have an unrealized pnl like that in the same position? Not being able to close this incorrectly executed trade was catastrophic for me. Still not sure what happened at all and its clear something went wrong.

Although I should have been quicker to recognize the problem, if you review my discord messages, you can see that my story is consistent. I had no idea what was happening, and something was not functioning properly that shouldn't have been happening.

Thanks for reading.

Edit: I later learned from rasputin cat that the keepers were not functioning properly at the time of the incident. Additionally, the "executing an unwanted trade" aspect of this problem occurred again in a new trade made a few hours later. This is all covered in our discord messages.

Odysseus