Drift Secures $147.5 Million From Tether, Drops Circle’s USDC After Massive Exploit

Tether commits $127.5 million to fund Drift’s recovery and relaunch on Solana, while a class action targets Circle for failing to freeze stolen USDC during the April 1 exploit.

Drift Protocol announced Thursday a recovery and relaunch plan backed by a $147.5 million funding package from Tether and partners, replacing Circle’s USDC with Tether’s USDT as its core settlement layer on Solana. 

The deal includes up to $127.5 million from Tether and $20 million from additional partners, structured as a revenue-linked credit facility designed to gradually repay approximately $295 million in user losses from the April 1 exploit. Drift’s DRIFT governance token surged roughly 20% on the announcement.

Drift said it will issue a dedicated recovery token, separate from the DRIFT governance token, to represent user claims on the recovery pool. A portion of ongoing trading revenue will flow into that pool. The protocol will undergo full independent audits of each component before relaunching.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The April 1 attack, which blockchain analytics firm Elliptic attributes to North Korean state-sponsored hackers, is considered the largest DeFi exploit of 2026. Attackers exploited a legitimate Solana feature to pre-sign administrative transactions weeks in advance before using them to seize governance control. More than $280 million was drained from Drift’s trading, lending, and vault deposits. Hackers then moved approximately $232 million in stolen USDC to Ethereum using Circle’s cross-chain transfer protocol over the course of several hours across more than 100 transactions. 

Drift had more than 175,000 users and roughly $150 billion in cumulative trading volume before the incident. DRIFT tokens fell approximately 70% in the aftermath.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has publicly defended Circle’s inaction during the exploit, stating the company does not freeze wallets without formal direction from law enforcement or courts and describing USDC as a regulated financial product subject to rule-of-law processes. 

Gibbs Mura, A Law Group filed a class action against Circle on April 14, alleging the stablecoin issuer had both technical authority and operational precedent to intervene and chose not to. Circle has not publicly responded to the suit. The legal action could set a precedent for how much responsibility centralized stablecoin issuers bear during active DeFi exploits.