Solana Developers Move to Retire Durable Nonces After the $270 Million Drift Hack

Solana developers have put forward a plan to end durable nonces, a feature that lets a signed transaction wait unsent for weeks. Normal transactions carry a recent blockhash and expire in about 30 seconds, but durable nonces swap that stamp for one that never goes stale. Attackers used this in April to drain at least $270 million from the trading protocol Drift, after getting approvals signed early and holding them for more than a week. Drift later blamed a North Korean state linked group. The draft, SIMD-0723, was filed on November 5 by Gabe Rodriguez of Anza and says every transaction must carry a recent blockhash after activation. It does not mention Drift and instead cites years of bugs, including a 2022 failure that halted mainnet for about 4.5 hours.

Deadline and Impact on Custodians and Exchanges

The feature would not switch off before May 5, 2027, giving users at least six months to migrate. The Solana Foundation’s own page still lists no date and starts its clock only when a replacement is ready, so the cutoff could slip. Custodians and exchanges that sign on air gapped machines will feel it most, since their approvals can take longer than 30 seconds. Durable nonce transactions made up about 3% of traffic in one June period but paid 30% of priority fees, and just 555 accounts sent 97.5% of them. Suggested replacements are onchain programs such as Anza’s Programmatic Signer and Blueshift’s Vector, though the draft warns a failed submission does not cancel an approval.

SOL Price Falls 4% and What Comes Next

SOL is down 4% over the last 24 hours. The proposal still needs approval from at least one engineer at Anza and one at Firedancer, the rival validator client built by Jump, before it can be merged.