Drift Protocol Rebrands to Velocity DEX Ahead of Relaunch

Solana perpetuals exchange Drift Protocol has rebranded to Velocity DEX, the protocol's official X account announced on Wednesday. Solana's own account confirmed the switch shortly after, posting "FYI: @driftprotocol is now @VelocityDEX."

Velocity DEX said the new name reflects "a cleaner architecture, a stronger security foundation, and a clearer sense of what this platform is for," and that a private beta will go out to select partners and traders "in the coming days." The rebrand follows an April 1 exploit that drained roughly $295.4 million from Drift's vaults, an attack Mandiant attributed to a DPRK-affiliated threat actor as part of the token-based recovery framework Drift set up to repay affected users, backed by exchange revenue, a $127.5 million Tether commitment and up to $20 million from partners.

Crypto-native aggregator DegenerateNews flagged the rebrand alongside the exploit history hours after Velocity's own post went out. Elliptic had earlier put the exploit total at $286 million in its own tracing of the attack, a figure in the same range as Drift's own $295.4 million tally.

Under the planned relaunch, Drift's replacement will operate as a leaner, perpetuals-only venue settled in USDT instead of USDC, dropping ancillary products such as Isolated Markets and Amplify, according to the recovery plan The Defiant covered last month. The protocol is also removing the durable-nonce mechanism that attackers exploited to get Drift's Security Council to unknowingly pre-sign transactions, and shifting to a freshly deployed program with rotated keys.

Chainalysis found the attackers used Solana's durable-nonce feature to obtain pre-signed transactions from Security Council members after a months-long social-engineering campaign, a method Elliptic linked to infrastructure associated with past DPRK-attributed operations. Under Drift's recovery framework, affected wallets received transferable tokens representing $1 of verified loss each, redeemable once the recovery pool clears $5 million and funded through a mix of protocol revenue, the Tether commitment and partner contributions.

Mainnet deployment of the rebuilt exchange will require instruction-level audits, time-locked admin actions and review under Solana's STRIDE security program, per the recovery plan. Velocity DEX gave no exact date for the public relaunch beyond the coming private beta, though Drift's recovery plan had targeted a Q2 2026 return to full service.