On Wednesday, crypto trading protocol Drift suffered a sophisticated hack leading to the loss of $280 million. What happened?
The Drift protocol suffers a major hack
On Wednesday, the perpetual trading protocol on Solana (SOL) Drift suffered a sophisticated attack leading to the theft of $213 million.
In total, $280 million would have been withdrawn from the protocol, according to his teams. As Charles Guillemet, the technical director of Ledger, points out, this is for the moment the biggest hack of 2026 and one of the most important on the Solana blockchain since the attack on the Wormhole bridge in 2022.
Here he describes a hack similar to that of Bybit in 2025, thus turning his suspicions towards North Korea. According to him:
Either the attackers directly stole enough private keys to reach the threshold required by multisigning, or, more likely, they compromised multiple machines belonging to the multisigners’ signers and tricked operators into approving a malicious transaction. The signatories may have believed they were signing a legitimate transaction while unwittingly authorizing the theft.
💡What are the best practices to protect yourself from hacking risks?
For their part, the Drift teams affirm that it “ there is no evidence of compromised seed phrases HAS”. For them, the attack, which would have been planned over several weeks, notably involves the use of ” sustainable nonces “, a functionality on Solana allowing to keep a transaction pending, which is similar to a kind of ticket which is consumed when said transaction is added to a block.
Buy a Ledger wallet and receive up to $100 in Bitcoin
Publicité
Regardless, all of the protocol’s lending and borrowing markets appear to be affected:
Drift’s explanation of their hack
Â
Even more, the crisis could spread to other protocols offering synergies with Drift. According to X user @DefiSolar, this could be the case for the Neutral Trade, Elemental, Synatra, Project 0 and Ranger Finance protocols. In this list, only the Synatra teams indicated that they were not affected, while the other projects were at least partially affected.
To understand this, our file on the Stream Finance affair offers an interesting key to understanding. Certainly, the mechanisms at play here are completely different, but this shows the risk that there can be in exposing oneself to protocols whose performance depends on other applications. Thus, this stacking of layers of risk can lead to a chain reaction that goes beyond the original incident.
💉 Also in the news — This crypto makes an April fool’s joke and its price rises by 11% in a few minutes
For now, it is still too early to take stock of the situation, which should evolve in the hours and days to come. From then on, we will follow this carefully.
Discover how to properly invest in Bitcoin (and protect your savings) with the Strategist method
Publicité
Sources : X
La Newsletter crypto n°1 ðŸž
Receive a summary of crypto news every day by email 💌
Some content or links in this article may be advertising. Cryptoast has studied the products or services presented, but cannot be held responsible for any damage or loss linked to their use. Investing in cryptocurrencies involves risks. Only invest what you are willing to lose.
Since 2021, I have devoted my free time to seriously educating myself on cryptocurrencies in order to acquire maximum knowledge and credibility. I often have the opportunity to conduct interviews with influential personalities in the blockchain industry. I also conduct in-depth analyzes on Web3 themes to offer exclusive content to Cryptoast readers.
Vincent Maire
2461 articles
