Close Markets to remove Locked SOL

[jnuno98]

I know this project is dead, but I really think there should be one last push to create a feature that allows users to close dead markets.

There is so much SOL locked in dead markets on Serum, as each market costed 4 SOL and there are thousands and thousands.

Are there any active developers in this community?

[gildastone]

Where would the remaining SOL be sent?

[jnuno98]

they would be sent to the account that created the market or to a given address. The only address with permission to close it should be the one that opened the market.
The closure of a market would imply that all the funds would be settled and orders cancelled.

[gildastone]

This could be very challenging as currently 99.9% of Solana markets are built with the purpose of being rugged. Adding a "close market" feature could add another door to rug a market that may be exploited by devs.
I also observed that there are thousands of SOL locked on dead markets which could be utilized somehow (sent to a Raydium pool, to a launchpad fund, insurance, or other). But as serum has been built with decentralization at his heart, no one except the dev has the authority to make such actions. So I believe those lost SOL are lost forever and contribute to SOL burn.

[jnuno98]

I understand your point, but I am arguing against it as Serum is now a dropped project. Multiple markets are now unused and the Serum DEX V3 program has less than 100 people per day interacting with it (on average).

So, I believe that it would be safe to build a mechanism for people withdraw their funds from old markets as absolutely no one is using them.

[gildastone]

Understand. Would be nice to be able to evaluate the effort vs reward (how much SOL are we talking about here). Is there a way to query serum to get a grasp of the markets and vault balances?

[jnuno98]

I'm not sure of any way to get a grasp of how many markets exist, but would say they are easily on the tens of thousands. Each market costed 4 SOL to be deployed, putting the overall value of around 500k-1M SOL lost.

As for implementation time I'm not really sure. This would also require an upgrade to the deployed program itself. I don't know if the team behind Serum is still doing upgrades to the programs.

Do you happen to know that?

[gildastone]

Last commit was made on 26th October 2022 (92992b3), not sure the team is still around as SBF is in jail and FTX collapsed. For sure there are thousands of SOL locked, wondering why any core developer hasn't tackle that issue?

[jnuno98]

Do you know any core developer I could tag here?

[gildastone]

@armaniferrante

[crosschainerd]

@gildastone @jnuno98 dropcopy.io has a "close market" option for OpenBook V2 to get market info and close it.

I'm also looking for more tools to recover funds from other old protocols. Any successes?