Pool Stuck in Destroying State: I Can’t Withdraw My Depositor Funds Because a Few Members Haven’t Migrated

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Hi everyone,

I’m running into a frustrating problem with nomination pools, and I think other depositors may be in the same situation.

I decided to destroy my nomination pool and followed the proper steps. After 28 days, I was able to unbond and withdraw most of the members’ funds — no problem there. But a few users that are both in pools and staking haven’t migrated yet and there’s no way for me to withdraw those specific users funds permissionlessly because of that non migrated state they are in due to (dual staking).

Now here’s the issue: because these few users haven’t withdrawn their bonded funds, I’m completely blocked from withdrawing my own funds as the depositor. The system requires the depositor to be the last to unbond and withdraw — but I can’t do that while these old member accounts still have stake locked in the pool.

There’s no way to contact these members. And since they haven’t unbonded themselves, I can’t withdraw for them. Their stake is just sitting there, and it’s preventing me from finishing the destruction of the pool and getting my DOT back.

This seems like a serious flaw. If even one member doesn’t withdraw and is in the migrate state, the depositor could be stuck forever and it’s alot to lose given the minimum deposit of 500 DOT to start a pool.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Is there anything the dev team can do, or plans to fix this behavior? This creates a very real risk for pool creators, and I hope it can be addressed asap as my funds are currently stuck indefinitely.

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You should post this in the Polkadot Discord and open a support ticket.

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Hi @Zezmo,

Thanks for raising this crucial issue. You’re right, this is a known problem impacting pool depositors, and I understand your frustration with stuck funds.

The good news is that a fix is on the way. This specific issue will be resolved when Polkadot upgrades to SDK version stable2503.

Why this is happening (and the upcoming fix):

This situation is a side effect of recent changes that enabled voting for nomination pool members. Post-implementation of these changes, accounts are no longer permitted to participate in both solo staking and nomination pools simultaneously. While many accounts migrated before this change, some remain stuck in a non migrated state. Unfortunately, this prevents you, as the pool depositor, from fully destroying the pool and withdrawing your funds because the system requires the depositor to be the last to withdraw.

The upcoming stable2503 SDK version update will address this by once again allowing accounts to do both solo stake as well as pooled stake and therefore enabling permissionless migration of these stuck pool accounts. Once migrated, pool owners will be able to successfully destroy their pools and retrieve their DOT.

Tentative Timeline: We’re currently looking at August for Kusama and September for Polkadot for this upgrade.

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