Newsroom / Drift

DexSheet Newsroom Incident

Drift loses more than $280M in multisig exploit; protocol relaunches as Velocity

Attackers drained the Solana perpetuals exchange in about 12 minutes. The team later rebuilt it as a new program.

· Effective · Verified 2026-10-17 via reputable press

Drift, a Solana perpetuals exchange, was exploited on 1 April 2026 with losses reported at more than $280 million. Attackers are reported to have taken assets in about 12 minutes across 31 transactions after gaining access to Drift's multisig wallets.

ZachXBT, Elliptic and TRM Labs attributed the attack to North Korea's Lazarus Group. Loss estimates range from $280 million to about $295 million.

The team later relaunched the exchange as Velocity, backed by a $127.5 million Tether credit line. Velocity's documentation describes it as an entirely new onchain program with a new program ID, with USDT as the mainnet quote asset, and no onchain state carried over from Drift.

Drift accounts, balances and referral links do not carry over to Velocity.

“no onchain state carries over: user accounts must be re-initialized and balances start fresh on Velocity.”

— Velocity Docs, Migrating from Drift

Who this affects

Drift depositors and traders with positions or balances at the time of the exploit; users moving to Velocity must open new accounts.

Drift at a glance

Drift was a Solana perpetuals and lending exchange that was paused after an April 2026 exploit and rebuilt as Velocity, a perps-only fork. Existing Drift accounts do not carry over; users must open new Velocity accounts.

Full Drift sheet · 0.12% round trip · Also affects Velocity

Drift is merged. Drift was exploited for more than $280M on April 1, 2026 and has not operated since; the Drift program is paused. The team relaunched as Velocity, a new fork of Drift v2 with a new program ID, USDT instead of USDC as quote asset, and no onchain state carried over. Velocity removed its whitelist on Sept 21, 2026. Fees and referral data below are Velocity's. See velocity instead

More from the newsroom

Sources

Last checked . Fees and terms change often; the venue's own page wins if it disagrees with ours.

  1. CoinSpot: Drift Protocol relaunches as Velocity DEX — checked 2026-10-17
  2. Velocity Docs: Migrating from Drift — checked 2026-10-17
  3. The Defiant: Drift rebrands to Velocity DEX — checked 2026-10-17

About DexSheet

DexSheet is an independent fee sheet for on-chain trading. It tracks the fees, custody, backers, incidents and availability of 81 crypto trading venues, with a dated source for every number. Every newsroom entry is checked against the venue's own announcement, docs or terms before it is published. Data: fees.json (CC BY 4.0) · RSS.