The global cryptocurrency community experienced a sleepless night as a serious attack targeting the Drift Protocol erupted on the social network X (Twitter) late on April 1, 2026. This incident quickly became one of the biggest DeFi hacks of the year, shaking the Solana ecosystem and raising concerns about the security risks of decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
According to various on-chain data and community aggregators, the attacker executed a series of massive transactions to withdraw assets from the platform in a very short period. The total value of stolen assets is estimated to exceed $270 million, representing nearly half of Drift's TVL of over $540 million before the incident. The withdrawn assets included approximately $155.6 million in JPL – the liquidation Token on Jupiter, about $60.4 million in USDC, and millions of dollars worth of wrapped SOL tokens and other stablecoins. The scale of the losses led many investors to describe it as a " liquidation shock" for the Perp DEX on Solana.
What particularly alarmed the community was how quickly the entire attack unfolded. Unusual transactions were being made within about an hour before users noticed anything suspicious on the blockchain. It took almost two more hours before Drift officially confirmed the “unusual activity,” advising users to temporarily stop depositing funds and emphasizing that this was definitely not an April Fool's joke, even though it happened on April 1st.
