Drift sets USDT relaunch after exploit and Tether-backed recovery plan

Losses and relaunch safeguards

Drift’s April 16 update listed total assets stolen at $295,706,374.93, a figure higher than earlier estimates of about $280 million and approximately $285 million cited elsewhere. The largest stolen asset by value was JLP at $159,329,898.68, followed by USDC at $71,415,648.65, cbBTC at $11,321,165.24, SOL at $10,426,959.98, USDT at $5,648,410.13, USDS at $5,254,126.13 and WETH at $4,684,896.11. Additional stolen assets included dSOL, WBTC, Fartcoin, jitoSOL, syrupUSDC, INF, mSOL, bSOL, EURC, zBTC, USDY and JUP.

Drift also said some assets remained on the protocol after the exploit, including 474,184.82 USDC-1, 7.57 USDT-4, 141.45 USDT, 8,743,353.07 DRIFT, 160,492.46 JTO, 106,121.45 WIF, 70,385.47 RENDER, 1,328,205.49 ZEUS and 19,608,468,997 BONK. Drift said the insurance fund was unaffected and that all insurance fund depositor assets remain intact for withdrawal upon relaunch.

Drift said relaunch is contingent on two independent audits. Ottersec is handling redesign and audit work on the codebase, while Asymmetric is advising on operational security. Drift said the new control structure will include a community-governed multisig, dedicated signing devices, independent transaction verification, timelocks on critical admin actions, real-time alerts and the disabling of durable nonces for signers.

Drift also said it is developing a bounty program with support from Arkham and Bybit, and expects to work with an additional leading Web3 blockchain intelligence firm in the next phase of recovery efforts.

USDT expansion and Circle dispute

Tether said Drift’s move to USDT will bring more than 128,000 users and over 35 ecosystem teams onto USDT-based trading on one of Solana’s largest perpetual trading venues. Tether named Gauntlet, Neutral and M1 as ecosystem examples attached to the migration and framed the switch as a broader liquidity and settlement realignment inside Solana trading infrastructure.

Drift’s pre-hack total value locked was about $550 million, which would have made it Solana’s eighth-largest protocol by that measure. Protos said the shift could become a meaningful opening for Tether on a network where USDC had stronger local positioning, noting that USDT’s broader market cap was more than 2.3 times USDC’s, while on Solana the relationship was reversed, with USDC at roughly $8.1 billion and USDT at roughly $3.05 billion.

The recovery package arrived amid criticism of Circle after attackers bridged stolen USDC from Solana to Ethereum through CCTP. The transfers were described as taking place across hundreds of transactions during a roughly six-hour window during U.S. business hours, when critics argued intervention was possible.

Circle’s public response came in an April 10 post by Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Global Policy & Operations. Disparte wrote that Circle freezes USDC only when it is “legally compelled by an appropriate authority, through lawful process,” and said the freeze function is a compliance obligation rather than a discretionary enforcement tool.

Disparte also argued that unilateral intervention without a rights-preserving legal framework would amount to arbitrary overreach. He wrote that the Drift incident exposed a gap in legal response speed rather than technical capability and pointed to the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act as opportunities to codify a faster-response framework.

Gibbs Mura, A Law Group filed a class action on April 14, 2026 on behalf of Drift investors who lost funds in what it called the largest cryptocurrency exploit of 2026. The lawsuit alleged that Circle knowingly allowed attackers reportedly tied to North Korea’s government to offload $230 million through USDC and CCTP over several hours without freezing the assets despite having the technical and contractual authority to do so.

The lawsuit also alleged the exploit caused Drift’s total value locked to fall from about $550 million to under $250 million and triggered indirect losses across at least 20 additional DeFi protocols. The complaint further alleged that Circle has accumulated more than $420 million in compliance failures from repeated incidents involving misappropriated funds. 

Community reaction included relief that a relaunch path had emerged after two weeks of uncertainty, alongside skepticism because the recovery depends on Drift’s future ability to generate enough fees and trading activity to make users whole. DeFiLlama’s 0xngmi described the structure as “closer to a plan where users recover their hacked amounts by trading on drift.”