Decentralized perpetuals protocol Levana had some help from it’s community over the weekend as users couldn’t close positions while developers went on holiday.
Levana users started seeing an error message Saturday that prevented them from closing long or short positions. At issue was “cranking,” the process of updating everything that makes Levana work, like closing positions, liquidations, or giving out LP rewards. Without cranking, users were effectively trapped, only able to watch positions as the cranking bot went down and the backup failed to kick in.
Levana’s Discord started filling up with user complaints. People were saying they couldn’t close positions on any of the markets Levana runs. BTC, ATOM, OSMO, ETH, and SEI were all “stuck.”
“Users should always be able to close positions/crank their position themselves in the GUI. Being locked out of closing a leverage trade is crazy.” Discord user 0xPhilipp said.
At 3:55 p.m. Saturday, a random user, Playwo, showed up in the Discord and started cranking manually using Osmosis’ Celatone. This allowed users to close positions, see their rewards and made Levana work again. The fix only lasted about 15 minutes and needed to be repeated. Playwo used his own money for gas and continued to crank so others could close their positions.
Discord users praised Playwo, posting appreciative comments:
“Absolute wizard over here saving the protocol,” said Roger Tennis.
“Devs owe this man a reward, airdrop 1% of supply. Absolute legend performance Playwo,” AGBULLBEAR said.
“We appreciate you,” said Trader Dantès.
Playwo went on to instruct others on how to crank Levana, putting out a set of instructions with all the smart contract addresses and what to put in the text box.
As Playwo logged off for the day, other users stepped up and ran the crank, including this reporter, who felt the call of web3 responsibility.
“Yeah I’m not related to Levana at all. Just did some digging into their contract code and docs previously which came in clutch here,” Playwo said.
The Levana team was quick to respond to the situation on Sunday morning, letting users know the team was offline “on Holiday” and the staff who was online did not know how to fix the problem. The team has since fixed the problem and is making sure it won’t happen in the future.
“The cranking bot crashed, and backups didn’t kick in. Not sure what caused the crash. We have been live for two months on mainnet and never seen this crash, and probably a year on testnet and never saw this. The main call to action is to make it easy for any user to push the crank, and to make sure that more people are running cranks and that back ups are better tested,” madcapslaugh said on Discord.
An incident report in a Medium article has been provided and can be read here.
Levana is in beta and has accumulated $98 million in total trade volume. The platform boasts 2,186 users and $1,808,403.77 in liquidity.
