Solana plans to scrap the feature used in Drift's $270m hack
Why it matters
If you hold clients' coins on Solana and sign transactions offline, your process may need rebuilding. Custodians will want the replacement tools tested well before the old method is switched off.
Post to XThe short version
Solana developers have proposed removing a feature that lets a signed payment order stay valid indefinitely. Attackers used it to take at least $270 million from Drift, a crypto trading service, on 1 April. According to CoinDesk, the change would not take effect before 5 May 2027, giving users at least six months to switch.
Here's what happened. A proposal filed on 5 November, called SIMD-0723, would remove "durable nonces" from Solana. Normally a signed transaction on Solana expires after about 30 seconds. Durable nonces let it stay valid until it is used, which is handy for firms that sign offline.
That same feature let attackers pre-sign transactions and leave them sitting for more than a week before draining at least $270m from Drift on 1 April, CoinDesk reported. The proposal says the change will not go live before May 2027, according to CoinDesk.
Who uses it? Not many, but they pay a lot. In one June period, these transactions were about 3.1% of all transactions but paid about 30% of priority fees, and 555 payers sent 97.5% of them, according to the Solana Foundation.
So what replaces it? The Solana Foundation names two candidate tools for offline signing: Anza's Programmatic Signer and Blueshift's Vector. Institutions had asked for six to 12 months after a replacement is live, the Foundation said.
The proposal still needs approval from engineers at both Anza and Firedancer, two teams that build Solana's core software.
Where this comes from
- SIMD-0723: Remove Durable Nonces · Solana Foundation (GitHub)
- Durable nonce deprecation · Solana Foundation
- Solana moves to scrap the transaction feature used in the $270 million Drift hack · CoinDesk
Written with AI from the sources above and checked against them before publishing. Here's how we work. This is news, not financial advice. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
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