Drift pays back about 1 cent per dollar so far: what hack recovery really looks like

A $1,000 loss in the Drift hack pays about $10.40 today. That is what a "recovery" looks like when it opens six months after the hack and starts with almost no money in the pot.

MINTGRAPHRECOVERY TIMELINE · REPORTED

1. Hack1 Apr 2026, $295.4M taken
2. Claims open1 Oct 2026, 1 DFX per dollar
3. First rateabout 1 cent per DFX
4. Money inrevenue flows, Tether and partners pending
5. Window ends1 Jan 2028, unclaimed DFX burned

Claims are open, but the pool started with almost no money. Nothing guarantees full repayment.

Source · Drift Foundation, The Block, 2 Oct 2026

What happened on 1 April?

The Drift Foundation says about $295.4 million was taken from Drift users on 1 April 2026. It says the security firm Mandiant identified the attacker as UNC6862, a North Korean threat group. That is the Foundation's statement, so we label it REPORTED.

Press reports describe a months-long social engineering operation, where members of Drift's security council were tricked into pre-signing transactions (REPORTED, Bitcoin.com and The Block). Chainalysis estimated about $285 million drained, which is lower than the Foundation's figure. We use $295.4 million because the recovery is built on it.

The exchange has since been rebuilt and renamed Velocity (REPORTED, The Block).

The Foundation runs the recovery.

How does DFX work?

DFX is a standard Solana token. Drift fixed the supply at 299,500,810.998 DFX, one per verified USDT of loss. No more will be minted (CONFIRMED, Drift's claim page, 1 October 2026).

1. Claim. Connect the wallet that controlled your Drift account on 1 April. Any other wallet shows nothing.
2. Redeem. Burn DFX and receive USDT at the current rate. It is final. You give up any share of later deposits.
3. Hold. Keep your claim as new deposits arrive and the supply shrinks.
4. Sell. Trade it on a market such as Raydium. The price there can differ from the redemption rate.

The redemption rate is the pool balance divided by the DFX still outstanding. Redeeming does not change it. Each daily deposit raises it. Drift gives one example: if 10% of the supply is redeemed, every remaining DFX gets about 11% more of each later deposit. Drift calls that an illustration, not a promise.

The claim window closes at 00:00 UTC on 1 January 2028, and unclaimed DFX is burned. On 5 October the Foundation clarified that DFX you have already claimed is not burned.

Drift announced the claims on X on 1 October 2026:

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Why only 1 cent?

The pool held about $3.11 million on 1 October. Divide that by roughly 299.5 million DFX and you get about 0.0104 USDT each.

By 2 October, about 216,480 DFX had been redeemed for roughly $2,250. The first daily revenue sweep into the pool was 31 USDT (REPORTED, The Block, 2 October 2026).

Money is meant to come from three places:

The Foundation said on 5 October that the Tether money "isn't a lump sum that has already been received". A May 2026 report did the sums. Drift earned $19 million in 2025. At that pace, even with all the partner money, filling the pool would take nearly eight years (REPORTED, Yahoo Finance, 5 May 2026). That is one writer's arithmetic, not our forecast.

Here is the Foundation's own clarification, posted on 5 October 2026:

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Can the stolen money come back?

Some of it might. The Foundation's update of 30 September 2026 says:

• About 130,259 ETH was bridged to Ethereum across four wallets. Three of them have not moved and hold 107,165 ETH.
• On 23 July one wallet sent about 23,094 ETH into Tornado Cash.
• About $9.2 million has been frozen. Releasing it needs law enforcement.
• A 10% bounty on recovered funds runs with Bybit's LazarusBounty.

Any recovered money goes into the DFX pool. When, or whether, that happens is unknown.

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The scam to expect

Every hack brings fake recovery offers. The Foundation's warning, from its 30 September post: it "will never message you directly about recovered funds, ask you to connect a wallet, or ask for a fee."

On 5 October the Foundation also said earlier wallet warnings on its claim site were resolved. If your wallet shows a new warning, stop and check Drift's own pages. Do not click through.

What we could not confirm

• The recovery pool and rate after 5 October. Drift's dashboard is live, but we could not read it.
• Why DFX supply (299.5 million) is a little above the headline loss ($295.4 million). We found no explanation.
• A DFX price chart. Drift says DFX trades on Raydium. We found no CoinGecko page for it on 15 October 2026, so there is no chart here. The DRIFT governance token is a different token.

This is research and safety guidance, not financial advice. The redemption rate is not a market price.

One next step

Read Drift's own page on how claims and redemptions work, then decide with the facts in front of you.

Read Drift's claim guidedrift.trade

Our September roundup shows how this compares with the year's other big losses: Crypto losses in September 2026.

Research noteCrypto losses in September 2026: about $766M, the worst month this year→

Sources

• Drift: DFX Claims and Redemptions are now open, 1 October 2026
• Drift Foundation recovery update on X, 30 September 2026
• The Block, 2 October 2026
• Bitcoin.com News, 4 October 2026