Drift to issue $1 recovery tokens; Tether pledges up to $127.5M
Drift will issue $1 recovery tokens to wallets hit in the April 1 Solana hack that drained $295M. Tether pledged up to $127.5M and partners up to $20M for recovery.
On April 1 the Solana-based exchange Drift was exploited, prompting the platform to suspend trading and borrowing. Forensic investigators tied the attack to a North Korea-affiliated threat actor. The breach drained $295,426,725.97 in user funds, with roughly 130,259 ETH-about $293 million at current prices-now concentrated in four flagged Ethereum wallets that are under active monitoring.
Drift plans to issue recovery tokens that represent $1 of verified loss for each affected wallet. The recovery pool will be seeded with about $3.8 million converted to stablecoins from the protocol’s remaining assets. The protocol said the fund will grow through quarterly exchange revenue and outside contributions, including up to $127.5 million from stablecoin issuer Tether and up to $20 million from other strategic partners.
Users will be eligible to begin redeeming tokens once the recovery fund exceeds $5 million. The protocol said early redemption will require forfeiting any future claims on the pool. Drift intends to continue adding funds until total inflows match the full listed exploit loss of $295,426,725.97.
Some stolen funds are currently inaccessible. Two transfers routed over the Wormhole bridge are on hold and will remain delayed until late July, and Circle has frozen three USDC transfers totaling about $3.36 million.
Drift set a relaunch target of Q2 2026 as a leaner exchange focused on perpetuals trading. The protocol reported that market makers have committed to support the relaunch and that Tether has provided a $20 million market-making facility to supply initial liquidity. Drift also opened a public bounty program with exchange Bybit that offers 10% of any successfully recovered assets to incentivize recovery efforts.
Planned security changes include deploying a new program at a fresh address with rotated keys, adding timelocks for sensitive administrative operations, and removing the durable-nonce attack surface that the April 1 exploit exploited. The exchange wrote that the team has restructured to concentrate on recovery and relaunch and that the work to restore the protocol is underway.
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