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Charles Guillemet, the CTO at Ledger, has shared his tackle right this moment’s hack of the Drift Protocol on the Solana chain. He has known as this occasion the largest hack in 2026 up to now.
This morning the official X account of the Drift Protocol confirmed the exploit and the lack of roughly $213 million in crypto. Later, on-chain trackers on X started reporting that the hacker began changing the stolen stablecoins into Ethereum.
“Greatest hack of 2026 up to now” and wake-up name
By the dimensions of the hack, Guillemet in contrast the exploit of the Drift Protocol, one of many main perpetual DEXes on the Solana chain, to the Wormhole Bridge exploit that occurred in 2022.
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Whereas not all the main points have been disclosed up to now, he continues, what was compromised was the multisig that managed the protocol. It was carried out a number of days or even perhaps weeks earlier than the hacker drained the funds from the platform.
The non-public keys had been both stolen by the hacker or, what the Ledger CTO believes to be extra doubtless, the hacker compromised a number of machines run by multisig signers after which “tricked the operators into approving a malicious transaction.” On this case, the signers thought they had been approving a authorized transaction whereas they had been truly licensed the drain with out even figuring out it.
This methodology of hacking appears to be like just like the assault on the Bybit alternate in 2025, and it’s extensively utilized by DPRK-linked unhealthy actors, Guillemet concluded. The sample of this modus operandi is the next, per the CTO: “Affected person, subtle supply-chain-level compromise concentrating on the human and operational layer, not the good contracts themselves.”
Charles Guillemet believes this can be a large wake-up name for the entire crypto business to implement higher mechanisms to detect such vulnerabilities earlier than they are often exploited. Additionally, he insists that safe key administration and clear signing should be carried out.
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Tether CEO’s response to hack
Paolo Ardoino despatched kudos to the USDT0 group, praising their fast response to the Drift Protocol exploit. As soon as the drain occurred, the group paused the legacy mesh infrastructure for the Solana chain inside 90 minutes, fearing that the hacker may use it.
Legacy Mesh hyperlinks native USDT throughout main blockchains, like Ethereum, Solana and TON, and permits for seamless omnichain transactions of USDT with out wrapped tokens.