A complex process to recover staked Solana (stSOL) from Lido on the Solana blockchain has become even more difficult, after an issue that prevents withdrawals was discovered in the protocol’s smart contracts.

Pavel Pavlov, a product manager at P2P, the firm that was in charge of running Lido on Solana, notified users of the bug preventing withdrawals in a post on Lido’s Discord channel on March 30.

“The current implementation uses the split function in the withdrawal process of the smart contract,” Pavlov said.

“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,” he added.

Lido sunset its protocol on the Solana blockchain in October after a community vote to stop services concluded, giving users until Feb. 4, 2024 to unstake their assets on the Solana frontend. After the deadline passed, however, the process of unstaking has become far more cumbersome, particularly for those not well versed with working with the protocol’s command line interface (CLI).

“This obviously is a lot more difficult to understand and harder to do. but the main problem now is that the CLI build that Lido is offering is broken – which means that users (who shouldn’t even need to play around with the CLI) feel like they’re stuck,” said J, a pseudonymous member at liquid staking protocol Sanctum, in a post on X. 

J said that users could still get their SOL back through Sanctum, a platform that offers an unstaking service that allows stSOL from any validator to be converted back to SOL with minimal slippage, “but this isn’t communicated at all to their users.”

At the time of writing, there were 112,931.34 stSOL tokens on Lido, worth a little over $24 million.