Tether is backing Drift Protocol’s comeback with up to $127.5 million after the Solana perpetual futures exchange lost $285 million in a North Korean hack on April 1. Combined with $20 million from additional partners, the $147.5 million rescue package will fund user recovery and relaunch Drift as a USDT-settled trading platform.
A perpetual futures exchange is a trading platform where users can bet on the future price of crypto assets without expiration dates on their contracts, using borrowed funds to amplify potential gains or losses.
Published: April 16, 2026 10:00 UTC
Key takeaways
- Tether commits up to $127.5 million to Drift Protocol’s recovery, with partners adding $20 million, for a total rescue package of $147.5 million.
- Drift will drop Circle’s USDC and switch entirely to Tether’s USDT as its base settlement asset when it relaunches on Solana.
- A revenue-sharing structure will direct a portion of Drift’s future trading fees toward covering the roughly $295 million in user losses from the April 1 exploit.
- The original attack was attributed with medium-high confidence to North Korean state-affiliated hackers who spent six months planning the operation.
Why Tether is funding the recovery
The deal is as much about market positioning as it is about rescue. Drift was previously a USDC-settled exchange, routing most of its volume through Circle’s stablecoin. By funding the recovery, Tether gains a direct onramp for USDT into one of Solana’s largest DeFi trading venues.
Tether plans to subsidize fee reductions and user incentives tied to the USDT transition, while also extending liquidity support to designated market makers to rebuild trading depth at relaunch. The $127.5 million commitment from Tether is structured as a revenue-linked facility, not a grant, meaning Drift will repay the capital over time through a share of its trading revenue.
No specific relaunch date has been announced. The funding package still needs to clear final governance approvals from both Drift’s community and Tether’s internal processes.
What the $285 million hack looked like
On April 1, attackers drained $285 million from Drift Protocol in roughly 12 minutes. The attack was not a smart contract bug. It was a six-month social engineering campaign that tricked multisig signers into pre-signing hidden authorizations, then exploited a zero-timelock Security Council migration to remove the protocol’s last safeguard.
The attackers manufactured a fictitious token called CarbonVote Token, seeded it with a few thousand dollars of fake liquidity, and manipulated Drift’s oracle system into treating it as legitimate collateral worth hundreds of millions. Once the collateral was accepted, they borrowed real assets against it and drained three primary vaults: the JLP Delta Neutral vault (roughly $155 million in JLP tokens), the SOL Super Staking vault, and the BTC Super Staking vault.
More than 15 token types were stolen, including USDC, SOL, cbBTC, wBTC, and liquid staking tokens. The attacker quickly swapped stolen assets to USDC via Solana DEX aggregators and bridged approximately $232 million to Ethereum using Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol before converting to ETH.
Blockchain forensics firms Elliptic, Chainalysis, and TRM Labs all linked the attack to DPRK-affiliated hackers, with Drift itself stating “medium-high confidence” that the same group behind the October 2024 Radiant Capital hack carried out this operation.
The recovery math
Total user losses stand at roughly $295 million when accounting for price movements between the exploit and the current valuation of stolen assets. The $147.5 million package covers about half of that figure upfront. The remainder is intended to come from Drift’s future trading revenue, channeled through a dedicated recovery pool.
Drift’s total value locked collapsed from approximately $550 million before the hack to under $250 million. Its governance token, DRIFT, has fallen roughly 70% since the exploit, trading at about $0.048 as of April 16.
What comes next for Drift and Solana DeFi
The Solana Foundation launched its STRIDE security initiative in direct response to the Drift hack, aiming to set new security standards for DeFi protocols building on the network. Whether Drift can rebuild user trust after the largest DeFi hack of 2026 remains the open question.
Tether’s investment signals a broader trend of stablecoin issuers using capital deployment to win distribution. Circle lost a major settlement venue. Tether gained one, if Drift can execute the relaunch.
Frequently asked questions
How will Drift Protocol users get their money back after the hack?
Drift is setting up a recovery pool funded by $147.5 million from Tether and partners, plus a share of future trading revenue. The pool is designed to cover approximately $295 million in total user losses over time through a revenue-sharing structure, though no fixed timeline for full repayment has been disclosed.
Why is Drift switching from USDC to USDT?
The switch is a condition of Tether’s $127.5 million funding commitment. Tether gains a major Solana DeFi trading venue for USDT settlement, while Drift gets the capital it needs to relaunch and fund user recovery. Tether is also subsidizing trading fee reductions and market maker liquidity to smooth the transition.
Who hacked Drift Protocol?
Multiple blockchain forensics firms and Drift itself attributed the attack with medium-high confidence to North Korean state-affiliated hackers linked to the group behind the 2024 Radiant Capital hack. The operation involved six months of social engineering before the actual exploit on April 1, 2026.
