Solana Scraps Durable Nonces After $270M Drift Hack — Will Custodians Cope?

Just 555 accounts sent 97.5% of Solana's durable-nonce transactions — a tiny corner of the network that still paid 30% of all priority fees. Now Solana's developers want that corner gone for good, and they have put a first date on it: May 5, 2027.

Key points:

• Solana developers filed SIMD-0723 to retire durable nonces, the feature attackers used in the $270 million Drift hack.
• The change lands no earlier than May 5, 2027, giving custodians and exchanges at least six months to rebuild offline signing.
• SOL traded near $85.59, down about 4% in 24 hours, in step with a market-wide sell-off rather than on this news alone.

My own read is simple: a signed transaction that never expires was always a loaded gun, and Solana is right to take it away. The part to watch is the six-month clock, because custodians rebuild slowly and May 2027 will arrive fast.

Here is what a durable nonce does. A normal Solana transaction carries a stamp tied to a recent block, called a blockhash, and it dies after about 30 seconds now that blocks run every 200 milliseconds. A durable nonce swaps that stamp for one that never goes stale, so a deal signed today can still run next month. Custodians and exchanges lean on that slack because their approvals happen on air-gapped machines, computers kept off the internet, where getting a signature to the network can take longer than 30 seconds.

On April 1, attackers drained at least $270 million from Drift, a trading platform on Solana. They had approvals signed in advance and let those transactions sit for more than a week before they used them to empty the platform. Drift later blamed a North Korean state-linked group. The loss ran to roughly half of Drift's $550 million in locked value, and the platform has since resumed work under a new name, Velocity.

Read also: Web3Auth Flaw Drains 44,000 Keplr Wallets — $6 Million Gone, Can It Come Back?

Three percent of the traffic, a third of the fees

The numbers behind the decision are lopsided. In one June measuring period, durable-nonce transactions made up about 3% of Solana traffic yet paid 30% of all priority fees, the tips users add to jump the queue. Just 555 accounts sent 97.5% of them, and the same data set calls the feature a tool that was "coopted for durable nonce spam." One honest note: those counts come from one researcher's post, not an audited network report, so treat them as a strong signal, not a settled fact. Even so, the shape is clear: a small set of heavy users kept a risky feature alive.

The draft proposal, SIMD-0723, was filed on November 5 by Gabe Rodriguez of Anza, the firm behind Solana's main validator software. Its core line is blunt: after activation, every transaction needs a recent blockhash. The draft does not name Drift. It builds its case on years of bugs instead, including a 2022 incident in which a failed transaction ran through both the blockhash and nonce paths and halted the network for about four and a half hours. The draft also puts the first firm date on a plan the Solana Foundation sketched in October: the feature will not switch off on mainnet before May 5, 2027. The Foundation's own page still says no date is set and starts its six-month clock only once a replacement is ready, so the real cut-off could land later than May. Before the draft can merge, it needs sign-off from at least one engineer at Anza and one at Firedancer, the rival validator software built by Jump.

So what do custodians do now?

The plan does not leave offline signing with nothing. The replacement is an onchain program that checks an offline signature, and two designs are named: Anza's Programmatic Signer and Blueshift's Vector. Neither is a clean swap. The draft warns that a failed run can leave an approval live, so a custody desk that sees a transfer fail cannot take it as proof the approval behind it has died. Every custodian and exchange that signs offline will have to rebuild how it moves coins, and the teams that run those desks should start that work now, while the old path still works, rather than in the last weeks before the cut-off.

A quick check stops one wrong read of the price. SOL traded near $85.59 on Monday, down about 4% in 24 hours, and it is easy to pin that drop on this news. The numbers say otherwise. Bitcoin sat near $73,990, down 2.4%, and Ether near $2,096, down 6.1%, on the same day. The whole market bled, and SOL's move sits inside that slide. This proposal changes Solana's plumbing in 2027. It says nothing about today's price, so traders should watch the market's next leg, not this headline, for the near-term direction.

What to watch next is concrete. First, whether engineers at Anza and Firedancer sign off on SIMD-0723 — without that, the draft goes nowhere. Second, whether the audits of Programmatic Signer and Vector finish clean, since custodians cannot move until a replacement is ready. Third, whether the May 5, 2027 date holds or slips toward the Foundation's slower clock. If you hold SOL, write down three numbers today: SOL near $86, Bitcoin near $74,000, and durable nonces' 30% share of priority fees. Check them again when the sign-off lands. Until then, treat May 5, 2027 as a draft date, not a deadline.

Read also: CZ Wants Crypto Security Alliance After $6.3B Binance Hack — Will Firms Join?

— BitByLine News Desk

This post is news only, not financial advice. BitByLine never tells anyone to buy or sell crypto. Whether you buy or not is always your own decision and your own risk, so do your own research first. Read our full Disclaimer.

Sources: CoinDesk, Crypto Briefing, Solana Foundation.