unionlabs/union · critical

expected validator, not found

Error message

expected validator, not found

What it means

Export iterates the validators-by-power index (reverse prefix iterator over ValidatorsKey) and re-fetches each validator via GetValidator. If the index yields an address whose validator record cannot be read back, the staking store is internally inconsistent and export panics — a defensive check copied from simapp ExportGenesis. On healthy state the two keys cannot disagree.

Source

Thrown at uniond/app/export.go:207

			panic(err)
		}
		return false
	})
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// Iterate through validators by power descending, reset bond heights, and
	// update bond intra-tx counters.
	store := ctx.KVStore(app.GetKey(stakingtypes.StoreKey))
	iter := storetypes.KVStoreReversePrefixIterator(store, stakingtypes.ValidatorsKey)
	counter := int16(0)

	for ; iter.Valid(); iter.Next() {
		addr := sdk.ValAddress(stakingtypes.AddressFromValidatorsKey(iter.Key()))
		validator, err := app.StakingKeeper.GetValidator(ctx, addr)
		if err != nil {
			panic("expected validator, not found")
		}

		validator.UnbondingHeight = 0
		if applyAllowedAddrs && !allowedAddrsMap[addr.String()] {
			validator.Jailed = true
		}

		if err := app.StakingKeeper.SetValidator(ctx, validator); err != nil {
			panic(err)
		}
		counter++
	}

	if err := iter.Close(); err != nil {
		app.Logger().Error("error while closing the key-value store reverse prefix iterator: ", err)
		return
	}

View on GitHub (pinned to 031785bb6d)

Solutions

1. Restore the node home from a known-good snapshot or synced copy and re-run export
2. Confirm binary/store compatibility — start the intended uniond version so migrations apply before exporting
3. If persistent, dump the staking store and diff validators-by-power keys against main validator records to identify the orphaned entry
4. If state cannot be reconciled, re-sync the chain rather than exporting corrupted genesis

# Never export from the live home dir; run against a snapshot copy
uniond export --home /backup/union-copy --for-zero-height > genesis.json 2> export.err || cat export.err

When it happens

Trigger: Corrupted IAVL/multi-store where the power index and the validators key set diverge; a data directory from an incompatible store version or an interrupted migration; a node home tampered with or hit by disk-level corruption.

Common situations: Swapping uniond binaries across store versions without running migrations, hardware/disk corruption, copying a data dir mid-write, prune/snapshot tooling bugs.

Related errors

• error while incrementing period: %w
• error while creating a new delegation period record: %w
• failed to read upgrade info from disk %s
• newValAddr is not of type bytes.HexBytes
• newValPubKey is not of type crypto.PubKey

AI-assisted analysis of unionlabs/union@031785bb6d (2026-08-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/d62ee27929c38ec1. Report an issue: GitHub.