First of all, I don’t want to defend anyone here, and I’m not getting any stake out of this myself. I agree with Ama above that the only way to be here is through sandwiching. Although, to be honest, I’ve always seen it as something where sandwiching existed before this auction, but the Marinade team saw how their stakes were used, and wanted part of that revenue stream to also go to their stakers. Meaning, I often see posts that seem to imply Marinade alone is to blame for sandwiching, which I don’t think is entirely fair.
Back to the current issue.
As I understand it, the auction program (contract) was supposed to lock funds on the validator’s account - an amount sufficient to cover their promised APY percentage (even with 0% uptime) for two epochs (? taking into account the deactivation time).
And as I understand, there was a bug in the program (contract) that prevented this from happening.
I think initially, each person who placed a bid and won discovered this issue by accident (maybe later it spread through some closed groups), even those who didn’t win but just participated and analyzed things.
But not the Marinade team.
Though it seems to me that this was their primary responsibility. At the end of the auction, they definitely knew how much SOL they’d receive for the auction epoch. And it should’ve been possible to notice that something was wrong within just 2 days after the first event of auction bid reduction.
Let me repeat - it seems that reducing the bid is, in itself, a valid action allowed by the program (contract). But for some reason, it applied even to the “closed” epochs.
I just want to say that, overall, it’s not so clear-cut for me…
P.S. Overall, I admit that I might have written complete nonsense above and don’t actually understand how the auction works (since I realized from the start that I wouldn’t be able to win and just didn’t participate). Feel free to tell me that.