Six months after $295.4 million was stolen from the Solana exchange then called Drift, its users can finally file a claim. For now, it pays about one cent on the dollar.
The exchange, since renamed Velocity, opened the process on Friday. Victims receive one DFX token for every dollar of USDT lost. Each token can be redeemed and burned for a share of a recovery pool, sold to someone else, or held.
The pool contains 3.11 million USDT, all of it from the protocol’s own assets. That works out at just over 0.01 USDT per token.
Larger sums have been promised. Tether has committed up to $127.5 million and unnamed strategic partners up to $20 million. None of that $147.5 million has arrived in the pool. A further $9.2 million in frozen funds needs clearance from law enforcement before it can be added.
Most of the stolen money sits in plain view. Wallets linked to the attacker hold 107,165 ether, worth nearly $286 million, and another moved 23,094 ether through Tornado Cash in July. Mandiant has attributed the April theft to a North Korean group it tracks as UNC6862.
The structure rewards patience, in theory. As tokens are burned, each remaining one has a claim on a larger share of whatever comes in, and a portion of protocol revenue is supposed to top up the pool. Claims stay open until 1 January 2028. Some users are not waiting. On the first day 216,480 DFX were redeemed for roughly 2,250 USDT.
What nobody has published is a schedule. The words attached to Tether’s pledge are “up to”, and neither it nor Velocity has said when the money moves or what would trigger it.
