Summary

Over the weekend, some concerns were raised about a number of pending stATOM delegations that had not been processed and remain in the Stride delegator queue. This report explains what happened, assesses the resolution, and explains how participants are working to prevent similar issues in the future.

TLDR; The gas change on the Cosmos Hub interacted poorly with LSM delegation, delaying some stATOM detaches. All stATOMs are fully supported (as always). All pending detaches should be resolved and begin processing as normal by 3pm ET Wednesday. Stride will also have a more permanent resolution coming soon.

Incident

The latest update to the Cosmos Hub software added an x/feemarket module that limits the gas that can be used for a single transaction to 30M. On most chains, this would not affect the number of undelegations that Stride can process. However, on the Cosmos Hub, Stride accepts LSM delegations. Today, it works like this: Stride accepts delegations, then rebalances, and then undelegates according to Stride’s target delegations (subject to the standard Cosmos SDK x/staking limits).

Depending on the number of LSM delegations Stride has in any given epoch, the number of required unbinds in a batch can exceed 35+ validators, which consumes >30M gas, violating the recently reduced gas limit on the Cosmos Hub. As a result, some Stride unbind batches have failed in the past few weeks.

In response, Stride participants proposed a software update on the Stride chain that we believed would resolve the issue. While this did resolve some pending delegators, there were still a few edge cases where excessive LSM delegations during the same period were causing the gas limit to be exceeded and those delegators to be reverted. A few days later, a parameter change proposal was put forward on the Stride chain to reduce the maximum number of messages allowed in ICA transactions. This proposal was accepted over the weekend.

The next round of stATOM detaches on the Cosmos Hub will begin on Wednesday at 3:00 PM. At that time, all pending stATOM detaches should be processed as normal. Stride will post an update once detaches begin. Stride members will be closely monitoring the chain in the hours leading up to and during the detaching epoch to ensure that these detaches are processed. If there is an issue with a detaching on Wednesday, Stride members will notify the community promptly.

Influence

To be clear, no user funds are at risk (and never have been). stATOM is fully supported by ATOM (and always has been). This issue caused de-delegation to take longer than usual for a subset of Stride users. During this time, these positions continued to accumulate staking rewards, which will be distributed to users when the de-delegation is processed, as with all other de-delegation transactions.

Stride support is communicating directly with all known users affected by this issue and all users who have opened a support ticket to keep them updated on the issue's progress.

Future

Stride participants are planning an upcoming software update that will completely eliminate the potential for this problem by splitting Stride disconnects into multiple transactions. This code is currently being audited and is expected to go live next month.

To increase user awareness of any future issues, Stride is also updating its status page to reflect pending disconnections in any host zone along with a descriptive message.

The design and process goals of Stride are to minimize the likelihood of bugs existing and to ensure that the impact of any bugs that do exist is minimized as much as possible. Safety has been, is, and always will be a top priority for Stride's core stakeholders.