Solana is moving to delete the transaction feature that made the $270 million Drift hack possible. Gabe Rodriguez of Anza filed draft proposal SIMD-0723 on November 5 to remove Solana durable nonces from the protocol – the most concrete protocol-level response to April’s drain so far.
Durable nonces let a signed transaction stay valid indefinitely instead of expiring with the standard blockhash window of roughly 90 seconds. Useful for offline and custodial signing. Also useful, it turns out, for pre-signing a heist.
How durable nonces turned into the getaway vehicle
In the April 1 attack on Drift, there was no code bug and no stolen keys. The attacker obtained two-of-five Drift Security Council multisig signatures through social engineering over roughly six months, posing as a quant trading firm. They then pre-signed administrative transfers using durable nonce accounts created in late March and executed the drain on April 1 – under a minute, after more than a week of setup – bypassing the multisig entirely.
Loss estimates start at $270 million and run to about $285 million per Chainalysis, TRM Labs and Elliptic, making it the largest DeFi hack to that point and over half of Drift’s TVL at the time. Attribution to a North Korean state-affiliated group remains preliminary. Funds were routed through NEAR, Backpack, Wormhole and Tornado Cash.
What SIMD-0723 actually changes
The draft would require every transaction to carry a recent blockhash, ending indefinite validity. It still needs technical approval from Anza and Firedancer engineers before merge, with the earliest mainnet activation at May 5, 2027 – a migration window of at least six months for custodians, exchanges and hot wallets that depend on offline or pre-signed flows.
The feature was already concentrated: researcher Max Resnick found 555 accounts sent 97.5% of durable nonce transactions. Critics of the removal note the proposal’s stated rationale leans on years of bugs – including a 2022 incident that halted mainnet for about 4.5 hours – and does not mention Drift by name. The template, meanwhile, is familiar: crypto rarely deletes a vulnerability before it has made the headlines first.
