Studies show that panicking during an emergency greatly decreases your odds of survival, and in reality its the panic itself (not the emergency) that causes the most death and destruction. So how does this apply to crypto? Well lets first qualify that panicking isn't always caused by a dangerous situation leading to your physical death, although maybe a financial one. Consider FOMO as a form of panic because in crypto FOMO generally means you are rushing with the crowd into an investment with little knowledge of what it is, but you just cant be left out. Then there is FUD, a chat moderators 2nd best friend. Sadly most FUD is driven by a false sense of entitlement, combined with panic and/or ignorance of a situation. “Where are the devs? Why aren't they personally responding to my 100 @’s and DMs to resolve my $300 deposit?” pretty well encapsulates most chat room interactions when something goes “wrong”. Sure we are all human and panic is a natural response mechanism, but it is how you handle those situation that signals your integrity.
By now you may have heard about this issue at Harvest Finance where a bug triggered by a lack of liquidity in wETH at Cream.finance was not handled properly by the withdraw function of the Harvest Finance smart contracts. TLDR; When a user went to withdraw a VERY LARGE sum of wETH from Harvest Finance, which was being used as an unleveraged deposit at Cream, there was not enough liquidity at Cream due to high user leverage on their platform, resulting in the Harvest Finance user receiving less wETH than they should have. All impacted users (11) have since seen their balances restored within 24 hours of the issue being reported (More Info)… A few things we need to unpack from all of this. First, regardless of the poking I do above at FUDsters, if I had appeared to have lost a chunk of funds in any platform, I would be sick about it until it was ultimately resolved. So anyone coming into the Discord chat worried and asking for help, the moderators were genuinely sympathetic and working around the clock to make sure everyone was informed as possible while the devs resolved the issue. (BibiCat is a stud!) Where the biggest problem lies, outside of the withdraw issue, is how people knee jerk react with pitchforks and torches before the devs have even been able to analyze the situation. Then people start tweeting half informed opinions which leads to price dumps, more panic and the stampede is in full swing. Did I mention none of the 11 impacted users lost funds? Yeah turns out the only people getting hurt are the ones who rushed for the door, not having the patience to analyze the situation, and the innocent bystanders who they knocked over on the way to the exit.
The other big take away I have is the developer response in making sure no users would be negatively impacted by the issue in the recently deployed strategy. To use some cheesy cliché, storms can hit a $FARM at any time, but it is the quality of the production and its farm hands which ensures that farm will endure. Harvest Finance is just over two weeks old and has deployed four strategies including being the first platform to begin collectively farming the UNI token, not to mention increasing the $FARM profit share from 5% to 30% and burning token emissions to reduce the free rider effect. When you consider all of their actions since the launch of Harvest Finance, you can tangibly see the devs are building something they stand behind and will respond effectively when called upon. #BreadForThePeople
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