Drift's DFX Recovery Token Opens at About a Cent on the Dollar

Users who lost money in the 1 April attack on Drift can now claim a token for it and redeem that token for about a cent. Claims and redemptions for DFX opened on 1 October. One token was issued per USDT of verified loss, against a snapshot taken on the day of the exploit, and each redeems at roughly 0.0104 USDT. The pool behind the token held about 3.11 million USDT at launch, against verified losses of $295.4 million. Four accounts give those figures and none disputes them.

A number that does not match our own

The $295.4 million is a verified-claims total. This desk has been carrying a smaller one. The 6 September tally of DeFi's 2026 losses put the April loss at about $285 million, following the incident trackers it was built from, and AMBCrypto's May account of the recovery plan said $295 million. A verified claim total and a tracker estimate are different measurements, so neither figure corrects the other. They do not reconcile, and nothing published this week says which one supersedes which.

Where the money is supposed to come from

Almost none of the promised money is in the pool. Tether has committed up to 127.5 million USDT and strategic partners up to 20 million, 147.5 million in all, and no account read here gives a trigger, a schedule or a condition for any of it arriving. What the pool does get is a slice of daily revenue from Velocity, the exchange Drift rebuilt and renamed after the attack: 60% to 90% of net protocol revenue, swept at 00:00 UTC. Solana Compass and Crypto Briefing carry the tiers in full, at 60% of the first 30,000 USDT a day, 70% of the band above that and 90% past 100,000 USDT. The first day produced 31 USDT.

Redeem, hold or sell

Only one of those three is irreversible. Redeeming burns the DFX and gives up any later payment from the pool, while holding keeps the claim and concentrates it, because supply shrinks as other people cash out. Crypto Briefing's reading of the terms is that burning a tenth of the supply would lift each surviving token's share of later deposits by roughly a tenth. Supply is fixed at 299,500,810.998 tokens. Holders can also sell, and Crypto Briefing alone says DFX is a Solana SPL token trading on Raydium.

"Three properties define DFX: the Recovery Pool only grows, the Redemption Amount never falls, and supply only shrinks," the claim terms said, in the version Solana Compass quoted.

107,165 ETH, and a subtraction that works

The attackers still hold 107,165 ETH across three wallets, worth about $286 million on the Friday valuations The Block and The Cryptonomist used. That figure can be checked against an older one. AMBCrypto reported 130,259 ETH still held in May. Then 23,094 ETH went through Tornado Cash, a mixer, in July, and the difference is 107,165 exactly. The two readings are the same stack five months apart, minus one laundering run, and no outlet read here makes the subtraction. About $9.2 million of the stolen funds is frozen; none of the accounts says who froze it. Mandiant attributes the attack to the threat group it tracks as UNC6862.

By Friday, 216,480 DFX had been redeemed for about 2,250 USDT, on two accounts. The claim window runs to 1 January 2028, which leaves fifteen months for the pool to fill from a revenue stream whose first day was 31 USDT. Nothing published says what Velocity's revenue actually runs at, or how many of the 299.5 million tokens have been claimed as against redeemed. A holder's choice is a cent now or a claim on whatever Tether's 127.5 million does next. September's $766 million of crypto theft made April look modest, and none of those victims has a token at all.