Solana-Based DeFi Exchange Suffers $285 Million Hack

Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Drift has suffered an exploit that drained $285 million in digital assets.

According to a report by Bloomberg News Wednesday (April 1), the incident on the Solana blockchain was flagged by cybersecurity and data analytics firms and acknowledged by Drift itself in a post on X.

“Drift Protocol is experiencing an active attack,” the post said. “Deposits and withdrawals have been suspended. We are coordinating with multiple security firms, bridges, and exchanges to contain the incident. This is not an April Fools joke.”

The amount of cryptocurrencies involved, as determined by blockchain data analysts, could make this one of the biggest hacks in crypto’s history, the Bloomberg report added, noting that some of the stolen crypto was converted into Circle’s USDC stablecoin.

The hacker likely exploited a new market on Drift that lets users borrow other cryptocurrencies against an illiquid token called CVT, the report said, citing Xuxian Jiang, a researcher at blockchain security company PeckShield.

The incident follows a year in which cryptocurrency thefts rose to $3.4 billion for the first nine months of the year, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis. Almost half of that figure came from one incident, the record $1.5 billion compromise of the Bybit crypto exchange.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about Chainalysis’ launch of blockchain intelligence agents created for fraud prevention.

This offering “shows that the industry’s response to AI-driven crypto fraud and bot attacks is one that, inevitably, must be symmetrical,” that report said.

“Agentic blockchain defenses are not innovation for efficiency’s sake. They are defensive escalation,” PYMNTS wrote.

“If bad actors can use artificial intelligence to accelerate activity, enforcement and compliance must use AI to compress detection and response times, meaning tasks that once took days should now take minutes, and investigations that required specialists must be executable by broader teams.”

Among the defining challenges of crypto, the report added, is that it is “transparent but not easily interpretable.” Transactions are public, though it takes specialized tools and expertise to understand them.

“If realized, the agentic approach being launched by Chainalysis could mark a significant redistribution of analytical power,” the report continued.

“Compliance officers, executives, and even non-technical stakeholders could access insights previously reserved for trained investigators. Reports that once took hours could be generated on demand. Alerts could be enriched, triaged and in some cases resolved automatically.”