Solana Moves To Kill Durable Nonces After $270M Drift Hack

Solana's developers are pushing to scrap durable nonces — the feature that let a signed transaction sit around, unsent, for as long as an attacker wanted. It was the exact mechanism used to drain at least $270 million from Drift in April, according to cryptobriefing.com.

Normal Solana transactions carry a blockhash stamp that expires in about 30 seconds, since the network now produces blocks every 200 milliseconds. Sign it and dawdle, and it's worthless paper. Durable nonces replace that stamp with one that never goes stale, so a signed transaction stays valid indefinitely until someone broadcasts it. Custodians and exchanges signing offline across multiple secure machines leaned on that breathing room.

The Drift exploit landed on April 1, 2026, with losses estimated between $270 million and $285 million — more than half the protocol's total value locked at the time. Attackers reportedly spent six months running a social engineering campaign against two members of Drift's Security Council, then fired off pre-signed transactions that handed over admin control and emptied reserves within minutes. The research points to North Korean state-affiliated actors tracked as UNC4736, tied to the Lazarus group, though that attribution remains a likely link rather than a confirmed one.

The Solana Foundation's response is a deprecation plan that shifts signature verification and replay protection into the protocol layer through onchain programmatic signers. Offline signing survives — custodians just have to rebuild their workflows on different plumbing. No definitive removal date exists; the changes hinge on upcoming audits and a migration window for affected users. The alternatives bring their own headache: transfer authorizations could stay valid even after a transaction fails.

Drift has resumed operations under the name Velocity, with the team stressing operational security and signer-risk management. It framed the breach as systemic weakness rather than a smart contract flaw, and rolled out a recovery plan including a new token, DFX, for affected users.

What to watch: the audit results on the programmatic signer approach, how long the migration window runs, and whether a firm removal date ever gets set. For now, durable nonces stay live on Solana — and so do the habits of the teams still using them.