The Drift Foundation issued one DFX token for each verified dollar taken in April's exploit, and the pool behind those 299.5 million tokens holds about $3.11 million. Tether and other partners have pledged up to $147.5 million more, none of which has arrived.
The Drift Foundation opened claims and redemptions on October 1 for users who lost money in the April exploit of its Solana perpetuals exchange, and the terms it published put the first payout at a little over one cent for every dollar taken.
The mechanism is a token. A user can claim one DFX for each verified dollar of loss, and the foundation fixed the supply at 299,500,810.998 DFX, which is also its clearest statement of how much it has verified as lost. Holders can redeem DFX for USDT out of a recovery pool, sell the token, or keep it. Redeeming burns the DFX and gives up any later payout attached to it.
The redemption rate is not fixed. The foundation set it as the recovery pool's balance divided by the outstanding DFX supply, so it rises as money enters the pool and as tokens are burned. The pool opened holding about $3.11 million. Against the full supply that works out at roughly 0.0104 USDT per token, or 1.04% of a dollar lost, which matches the rate reported independently by Solana Compass and The Block.
Most of the money that would move that number has been promised rather than delivered. Tether has committed up to $127.5 million "to support relaunch and user recovery" and other strategic partners up to $20 million, according to the foundation's update. Neither commitment has reached the pool. If the entire $147.5 million arrived and no tokens had been burned, the pool would hold about $150.6 million against 299.5 million DFX, or close to 50 cents per dollar lost. That is the arithmetic of the pledges rather than a forecast: the update attaches no date to either commitment and no condition that would let a holder judge the odds.
The pool's other source of income is a share of the relaunched exchange, which now trades as Velocity. The foundation set a tiered daily cut of its net protocol revenue: 60% of the first 30,000 USDT each day, 70% of the band from 30,000 to 100,000, and 90% of anything above that. How much that delivers depends on volumes the foundation has not projected.
About $9.2 million of the stolen funds has been frozen and is waiting on law enforcement clearance before it can be added to the pool, The Block reported. Frozen is not recovered and recovered is not distributed, and the update does not say when or whether that money reaches DFX holders.
The exploit was on April 1, 2026, and the funds were moved to Ethereum. The forensic firm Mandiant attributed the theft to a North Korean group it tracks as UNC6862, The Block reported, an attribution from a private investigator rather than a charging document or a court finding. The foundation's late-September update put user losses at about $295.4 million; the DFX supply implies a verified total nearer $299.5 million, and the update does not state a single total.
Uptake has been slight. As of Friday afternoon in New York, The Block counted 216,480 DFX redeemed for about $2,250 of USDT, roughly 0.007% of the supply. Because redeeming burns the token, that also means the outstanding supply, which is the denominator of the rate, has barely moved.
Compensation after a theft of this scale has no settled shape in the industry, and the approaches on offer differ sharply in who carries the loss. NEAR Intents promised to cover users in full after an omni bridge bug cost it about $3.8 million this week, a sum a protocol can absorb. Drift's loss is roughly eighty times that, and the structure it has published moves the recovery onto a token whose value depends on future revenue and on commitments that are not yet funded. Bitget's $351.6 million release in September was set against a user protection fund the exchange says covers it. Drift's recovery is being assembled after the loss, out of pledges and future revenue.
Claims close at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028. Until the pledged money appears, the choice in front of a DFX holder is between about a cent on the dollar now and an unscheduled claim on a pool funded at about 1% of what was lost.
