Drift Exploiter Sends 25,700 ETH to Tornado Cash

A wallet linked to the Drift Protocol hack sent 25,700 ETH, about $61.6M, into the Tornado Cash mixer over two hours on Tuesday, October 20, after roughly two months of inactivity. The transfers were flagged by on-chain analytics firm Lookonchain, as reported by Cointelegraph.

Details

According to Arkham Intelligence, the exploiter's addresses still hold about 81,454 ETH, roughly $194M. Other trackers cite similar balances, for example 81,864 ETH, but the amount already sent to the mixer varies between 13,400 and 25,700 ETH, as crypto.news notes. We use Lookonchain's figure, which is the highest.

Drift is a Solana-based decentralized exchange. It was exploited on April 1: Chainalysis estimated losses at about $285M, while Drift later put the figure near $295.7M, a difference of valuation method. Per crypto.news, the attack began with social engineering aimed at members of the protocol's Security Council. Mandiant attributed the breach to UNC6862, a suspected North Korean group.

Since October 1, Drift has been issuing DFX recovery tokens to affected users at one token per $1 lost. The initial pool was about $3.1M.

What this means for the market

Mixing makes the funds harder to trace and freeze: the more ETH passes through Tornado Cash, the lower the odds of recovery. A large balance remains in the exploiter's wallets, so further transfers are possible. Dollar values here reflect prices when the data was published and will move. For the current market picture, see the daily summary; for Ethereum, the coin page.