DEV Community: Kostik2k

How a Bug in My Code Cost Me $14,000 in One Night, and Why Solana Is Quietly Hiding Your Money

Kostik2k — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 11:24:43 +0000

The crypto industry loves selling us the fairy tale of absolute control.
"You are the true owner of your money." "No middlemen, no hidden fees." You download Phantom, buy a hot memecoin, get liquidated, or maybe ride it to the moon, and you think everything is under your control.
But there is one tiny detail they forgot to tell you. Solana is designed in a way that every single action you take — buying a token, minting an NFT, or opening a DeFi position — requires a deposit to store data on the blockchain. This is called account rent, and it locks up roughly 0.00204 SOL for every token account opened.
When you sell a coin down to zero or abandon a wallet, this deposit does not get returned automatically. It stays locked in the network forever. Multiply this by billions of accounts, and you get hundreds of millions of dollars just gathering dust on the blockchain’s balance sheet.
I decided to build a tool to take those dollars back. And in the process, I almost lost my mind.

Part I: The Massive Price Drop Nobody Noticed

In September 2026, Solana quietly rolled out SIMD-0437. For network geeks, it’s just a technical parameter change that slashes account rent costs by up to 90% in several phases. But for everyday users, it means something entirely different:
• Before: An account required 0.00204 SOL.
• Now: The network requires significantly less.
• The Catch: Every single one of your token accounts (even the active ones!) now has an excess balance waiting to be reclaimed.
There is an native instruction called WithdrawExcessLamports that lets you drain this hidden extra cash without closing your wallets or touching your active tokens. Yet, industry giants like Sol Incinerator and Claim Your SOL are stuck in the past. They still force you to manually burn or close empty accounts to get pennies back. Plus, their web interfaces look like they were designed on a napkin in the Web1 era.
I realized people need an ultimate UX where they don't have to think. One button to scan, one button to reclaim everything.
That is how ExcessSol was born.

Part II: A Scream in the Void and a Quick $70

Once I finished the core user interface, I needed to see if real people would actually use it. I recorded a completely basic, raw screen recording on my phone: I opened my site, clicked the button, Phantom showed a safe simulation, and boom — SOL dropped right back into my balance.
I uploaded that video to TikTok on a completely brand-new account with zero followers. No hashtags, no paid ads, no warm-up.
Five short videos. Combined, they pulled a miserable 200 views. Hilarious numbers for the TikTok algorithm, right? But guess what? Out of those 200 random viewers, a handful clicked the link in my bio and connected their wallets.
In a single evening with practically zero reach, I made $70 in clean commissions. People saw the proof on screen, checked their old wallets, and grabbed their cash. The conversion rate was insane. That was the exact moment I knew I was sitting on a goldmine.

Part III: A Billionaire Knocks on an Unfinished Door

I moved the project over to the official domain, excesssol.xyz. The claiming smart contract function was only about 70% finished. I hadn't started marketing, hadn't dropped links in alpha groups, nothing. The site was just sitting live on the web while I was locally refactoring the backend and adding killer features.
Late at night, I was casually scrolling through the server logs. Suddenly, my heart skipped a beat.
A wallet connected out of nowhere. Someone had found the site via organic search queries for "Solana rent refund." I copied the wallet address and pasted it into Solscan, expecting to see a standard degen wallet with $50 or $100 bucks inside.
The Solscan screen loaded: $1,000,000,000+ in USDT and 253 million in SOL.
This wasn't just a whale. It was the official hot wallet of Binance (the infamous 5tzFkiKscXHK5ZXCGbXZxdw7gTjjD1mBwuoFbhUvuAi9), which they use to route liquidity for millions of global users. Because of the recent rent updates, it was sitting on thousands of un-optimized token accounts.
I stared at my monitor, watching a script or an exchange engineer try to execute my claim function.
• Attempt 1 — Failed (Error).
• Attempt 2 — Failed (Error).
• Attempt 3 — Failed (Error).
My code crashed. Because the function hadn't been fully optimized and tested to handle massive blockchain data structures of that scale, the transaction failed a serialization check and threw an unhandled error.
The potential rent recovery on that single wallet was roughly 1,200 SOL (~$140,000). With my flat 10% platform fee, I would have made $14,000 on a single transaction.
They disconnected and left. I sat there in front of my monitor at 3:00 AM, realizing that a silly bug I was too lazy to patch during the day just cost me a brand-new car.

Part IV: We Are Coming for the Throne

That night didn't break me; it made me furious. I locked myself in a room and rewrote the entire system from scratch. Now, ExcessSol is hardened to process anything you throw at it — from a micro-retail trader to a Tier-1 centralized exchange.
I know Sol Incinerator and Claim Your SOL currently rule this niche. But they’ve gotten lazy. We are coming to take their crown, and here is exactly why ExcessSol will displace them:

Ultimate UX: You don’t have to guess which account to burn or close. Our engine automatically scans and reveals hidden rent surpluses that older platforms can’t even see.
Built-in Viral Marketing: Right on the website, I built a feature that generates a unique promo video featuring your personal cleanup stats in one click. You don't need editing skills — just download the video, throw it onto Instagram Reels or TikTok, and farm views.
3-Tier Referral Ecosystem: Unlike the competitors, I am giving a massive cut of the platform's revenue back to the community. If someone uses your link, you get a percentage of their reclaimed SOL. If they invite a friend, you get a piece of that too. And if that friend brings in a whale? You will be printing passive SOL from three levels of depth.

What You Should Do Right Now

You can close this tab and move on. Or, you can dust off that old Phantom or Backpack wallet you used a year or two ago during the peak airdrop season and memecoin frenzies.

Go to excesssol.xyz.
Connect your wallet (The connection is strictly read-only; the site never asks for seed phrases or permission to transfer your tokens).
Click "Scan". Right now, the Solana network is holding $20, $50, or $500 of your money that you didn't even know existed. Don't leave it to the network validators. Go claim what is rightfully yours.

The Solana Rent Trick Nobody Told You About

Kostik2k — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:58:07 +0000

How I found $50 in a wallet I abandoned two years ago — and why thousands of users are sitting on money they don't know exists

The pitch was simple: you own your crypto.

Not your bank. Not a broker. Not a middleman taking a cut every time you move a dollar. Just you and a private key, and the entire network of Solana behind it.

That's what they told you when you downloaded Phantom. That's what you believed when you bought your first memecoin. That's what you kept telling yourself when you sold at a loss and told your friends it was a "long-term play."

And it's true — mostly.

But here's what they didn't tell you: while you were buying and selling and forgetting, Solana was quietly locking your SOL in accounts you didn't know existed. Not stealing it. Not spending it. Just holding it, waiting for you to come back.

Most people never do.

Part I — The Promise
Let's start with what the network says about itself.

Solana is fast. Solana is cheap. Solana is the chain where you can buy a memecoin for $5, sell it for $6, and still come out ahead after fees. That's the pitch. That's why millions of users trade on it every day.

But there's a hidden layer — a rent system — that almost nobody explains to you when you're opening your first wallet.

Here's how it works:

Every time you buy a new token or mint an NFT on Solana, the network creates a token account for it. This account needs to exist on the blockchain, and storing data on a blockchain costs money. So the network locks a small deposit — about 0.00204 SOL — into the account as collateral.

This deposit is not a fee. It's not burned. It's not paid to validators. It's your money, locked in an account, waiting for you to close the account and take it back.

Most people never close those accounts.

They buy the token. They sell the token. They walk away. And the 0.002 SOL stays locked forever, along with millions of other forgotten deposits.

Multiply that by 1.16 billion token accounts across the network, and you get a number that very few people talk about: over 3 million SOL sitting idle in abandoned accounts. At today's prices, that's roughly $350 million.

That's not a bug. That's the system working exactly as designed.

The problem is that nobody told you about the design.

Part II — The Change
In September 2026, something happened that almost nobody noticed.

Solana rolled out SIMD-0437 — a proposal to reduce the cost of account rent by 90%, phased across five stages. For the network, this is a technical optimization. For users, it's something entirely different.

When rent drops, the minimum amount of SOL required to keep an account alive drops with it. And that means the excess — the difference between what you originally deposited and what the network now requires — becomes reclaimable.

Here's a concrete example:

Before: A token account required 0.00204 SOL in rent.

After Stage 2: The same account requires ~0.00149 SOL.

Excess: ~0.00055 SOL per account.

That's per account. Now multiply it by the hundreds of accounts most active Solana users have from years of trading. Then multiply it again by the millions of users on the network.

That's the number that quietly became reclaimable in September 2026: 918,000 SOL, worth roughly $107 million.

And Solana didn't send anyone an email about it.

Part III — The Discovery
I didn't know any of this when I opened an old wallet I hadn't touched since 2022.

I was cleaning up some accounts — nothing serious. Just curious about what was still there. I opened Phantom, connected the wallet, and saw a balance I didn't remember: 0.15 SOL.

Not life-changing money. Not even close. But it didn't make sense. I hadn't used this wallet in over a year. Where did it come from?

I did some research. That's when I learned about WithdrawExcessLamports — a Solana instruction that lets you pull excess rent out of an account without closing it. I learned about empty token accounts — accounts with zero balance that still hold locked rent. And I learned about spam NFTs — airdropped junk that locks rent in your wallet just by existing.

The math was simple: if I had 0.15 SOL stuck, thousands of other users did too. Most of them didn't know. Most of them would never find out.

So I built a tool. I called it ExcessSol.

Part IV — The Binance Moment
The tool was simple. Connect a wallet. Scan for excess rent, empty accounts, and spam NFTs. Show the total. Let the user claim it with one transaction.

I didn't promote it. I didn't post the link anywhere. I just deployed it to a temporary URL and let it sit.

Two days later, I checked the analytics.

32 visitors. Zero promotion.

I was confused. I hadn't told anyone. Then I saw the source. People were searching for "reclaim SOL" and "Solana rent refund" on Google — and finding me. One of them connected their wallet. A real user, from the United States, looking for their stuck SOL.

Then, a few nights later, another connection appeared. I ran the address through Solscan.

5tzFkiKscXHK5ZXCGbXZxdw7gTjjD1mBwuoFbhUvuAi9

That wallet held over $1 billion in USDT and 253 million in SOL. It was one of Binance's hot wallets — the operational wallets the exchange uses for its own liquidity.

I watched as it tried to claim. Once. Twice. Three times. Every attempt failed.

My claim function wasn't finished. It threw an error and did nothing. The potential return: 1,200 SOL (~$140,000)*. My commission at 10%: *~$14,000. In one transaction.

I lost it because of a bug I hadn't fixed yet.

Part V — What This Means for You
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you probably have money you don't know about.

If you've traded on Solana in the last two years — bought a memecoin, minted an NFT, participated in an airdrop — you have token accounts you've forgotten about. Each one holds locked rent. Most of them have been sitting there for months.

Solana's rent reduction made that money reclaimable. But it didn't tell you.

No push notification.

No email.

No message in your wallet.

Just a quiet change in the network's parameters, and a completely new category of money you didn't know existed.

That's the gap ExcessSol fills. Not by inventing anything. By making an existing mechanism accessible.

Part VI — How to Check
If you have a Solana wallet — especially one that's older than a few months — here's how to check:

Go to excesssol.xyz.

Connect your wallet (read-only, no seed phrase).

Click "Find empty accounts."

Review what's found.

Click "Return SOL" and sign in Phantom.

Receive SOL back in your wallet.

The fee is 10% of what's reclaimed. If nothing is found, you pay nothing.

You don't need to trust me. You don't need to trust the tool. All you need to do is open your wallet, look at what's there, and decide for yourself whether the number makes sense.

That's the whole point of crypto. That's the promise.

And for once — the promise is actually true.

Part VII — The Bigger Picture
There's a version of this story that ends with me making $14,000 in one night and moving on. That version doesn't exist. I lost it. And I'm still here.

But there's another version — one where thousands of users reclaim SOL they didn't know they had. One where the $350 million sitting idle in abandoned accounts finds its way back to the people it belongs to. One where the crypto promise — the one about ownership and control — actually holds up under scrutiny.

That version is the one worth building for.

If you have an old Solana wallet, check it. There might be money waiting for you.

And if you don't — share this with someone who does.

Try it: excesssol.xyz

ExcessSol is a free-to-use tool. You only pay a 10% commission if we successfully return SOL to your wallet. No private keys. No risk. Just money that's already yours.