Tens of thousands of people had been looking forward to the launch of KlimaDAO on October 18th. It was supposed to happen at 20:00 (UTC) on SushiSwap, but if you showed up then, all you would discover was a big mess and something that didn’t remind you a lot of a grand opening. Discord was bombarded with messages, trading of the Klima token (and BCT) was on hold, and it all just gave the impression of being a big mess. What really happened?

We will update this article with even more information later, but let us first just copy the words of the KlimaDAO team so that you can read through their official explanation first.

KlimaDAO Launch Post Mortem

Klimates, we are live.

The delay was centered around one issue: just ahead of launch a rogue BCT pool was set up with around 15,000 BCT priced at $100, with very low liquidity and a number of bots trying to front run transactions. The price appreciated rapidly to $1,600. The pool was untradable and therefore the disbursement of BCT and KLIMA into the ecosystem was delayed.

It is our understanding that the pool was set-up by someone who acquired BCT ahead of time. Although we understand the act was not malicious, it meant that the KlimaDAO team had to react to the changing launch parameters.

Our preference to fix this issue would have been to deploy a second BCT/USDC Suhsi Pool to avoid the risks of interacting with this initial pool. However, it is not possible to set up a second pool for a pair on SushiSwap. Setting up alternative BCT/DAI or BCT/USDT pools was considered inappropriate work arounds.

We there took the action to sell into the BCT/USDC pool to drive down the price and add sufficient liquidity to make it tradable. By 22:15 (UTC) the pool was stabilized at around 10 USDC/BCT.

Delaying launch for a day or week was clearly not considered as a viable option given that the BCT liquidity pool had already been established. A fully delayed launch would have exacerbated the risks and issues.

We are aware our launch issue was also compounded by problems in our Discord, which ostensibly could not cope with 1,000s of Klimates in the voice chats. With over 27,000 people in the Discord, significant amounts of spam and an unmanageable volumes of messages, we took the decision to lock the channels until the Discord server slowed down, formal announcements were made in #announcments.

We apologize for the delay at launch, as well as the communication issues we faced in the Discord.

We sincerely appreciate your patience while we dealt with the issue, and we are incredibly grateful for our community who have worked with us throughout the night, flagging issues, supporting other community members and participating in #office-q-and-a.

We will be continuing our bi-weekly office hours and we encourage community members to drop into the Discord to discuss any of the above with us.

We are incredibly excited about what we can achieve in the coming months with the community. The carbon blackhole has started.

Thank you, KlimaDAO Team.

That is the official explanation. Besides this, there were also technical errors that caused people not to be able to stake their Klima tokens, and after staking, they were unable to see their sKlima tokens, and some others as well. Almost 20 hours later, things are starting to stabilize and the entire situation seems to be under control, and currently, the $KLIMA token is trading at around $2000 on SushiSwap.

What about the second bug with staking and invisible sKlima tokens?

Not only was the official launch and trading delayed, but once the application was opened and people could start to stake their tokens, even more errors showed up. First, many people were unable to stake their tokens. This was caused by an error that was quickly discovered in which the system didn’t work properly. Further on, once you succeeded with the staking process, it seemed as if your tokens had disappeared, while you didn’t receive any sKlima tokens. This was immediately refused by the team, and they said that it is just a minor bug and a fix is around the corner. And the fix has already come and you can read about it here.

What caused this error? This is the official explanation.

What caused this bug?

Archimedes accidentally set the epoch to 0 instead of 1 affecting the warmupPeriod of sKLIMA. What is the warmup? The warmup period is a number of epochs before a staker can take their sKLIMA. If the staker withdraws before the end of their warmup, they will receive back only the KLIMA they staked (no rewards). If the staker withdraws after the end of their warmup, they will receive their sKLIMA including all rewards. So what was the issue? Initially, this epoch parameter was set to 0 when it should have been set to 1. This led to some KLIMA deposits to have a warmup expiry at epoch 0 which meant the contract would hold their sKLIMA until epoch 0 which isn’t possible as epochs only go up. The fix is to forfeit and restake effectively resetting the expiry of your sKLIMA as described below.

The KlimaDAO team.

Now things seem to work find and the first reward (first rebase) is just around the corner (in less than an hour). Let us hope that this will be the start of something great that will be a blessing to people and to the environment!