Drift Protocol has reportedly received $127.5 million in support from Tether to partially compensate users affected by the attack on April 1 on Solana (SOL).

This commitment would cover approximately 47% of the estimated $270 million to $285 million in stolen funds. It is one of the largest interventions by a stablecoin issuer following a DeFi security incident.

Tether intervenes after largest DeFi hack of 2026

The attack on Drift on April 1, Solana’s largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange, was not an ordinary smart contract attack.

Blockchain analysis company Elliptic attributes the attack to North Korean-linked actors, who spent six months infiltrating the core team of the protocol.

The attackers posed as a quantitative trading company, built trust at conferences, and infected devices through a malicious TestFlight app and a vulnerability in VSCode.

They then manipulated Drift’s multisig approvals with Solana’s durable nonces feature to empty the core vault where USDC, SOL, and JLP tokens were stored.

Due to this incident, the total value locked of Drift dropped from $550 million to about $230 million. The Drift (DRIFT) token lost over 30% in value immediately.

The reported involvement of Tether shows that stablecoin issuers are increasingly willing to serve as a safety net during major crises in the ecosystem.

Yet this partial recovery also shows that there are still vulnerabilities in operational security, even among mature protocols.

There is criticism regarding whether external rescue actions create a moral hazard by reducing incentives for protocols to invest in security themselves.

Others note that Circle refused to freeze the stolen USDC during the attack, raising questions among on-chain researchers.

Circle states that they can only intervene when they receive a court order and thus cannot freeze USDC on their own initiative.

“When Circle freezes USDC, it is not because we, unilaterally or arbitrarily, decide that someone should lose their assets. It is because the law requires us to do so,” wrote Circle’s CSO Dante Disparte in a blog.

The Drift team is continuing to collaborate with security companies SEAL 911 and OtterSec, along with the STRIDE initiative from the Solana Foundation.

There are no details yet on the timeline for user claims and the exact distribution.