Victims of the April 1 exploit that drained approximately $295.4 million from the Drift Foundation — since relaunched as Velocity — are pushing back against the repayment rate attached to the DFX recovery token, which currently works out to roughly one cent for every dollar lost.

The claims and redemptions window, confirmed in an October 1 release and announced on X by the project, provides the first working portal for the tens of thousands of Drift users affected by the attack, more than five months after it made headlines.

Why 100 USDT lost in the Drift exploit is worth about 1 US now

The math behind the DFX recovery token converts each verified dollar lost in the Drift hack into one DFX token, a standard SPL token on Solana that holders can keep, redeem, or sell on Raydium or other secondary markets.

The token's USDT value is not fixed. According to the Drift Foundation's claims guide, USDT value is calculated by dividing the Recovery Pool balance by the number of DFX tokens still outstanding.

DFX was worth around 0.0104 USDT at launch. A user who lost 100 USDT in April therefore holds 100 DFX now, which can be redeemed for about 1.04 USDT at the current exchange rate. That figure reflects a Recovery Pool holding roughly 3.11 million USDT against a fixed supply of 299,500,810.998 DFX.

Speculative trading on DFX has heated up quickly, with the token climbing about 210% in 24 hours to roughly $0.03. Liquidity remains thin at around $200,000, which also implies volatility. That market price sits well above the roughly 0.0104 USDT per-token value implied by the current pool arithmetic, leaving holders with two different reference points — the redemption portal and the secondary market — for the same claim.

Cryptopolitan reported in May on Drift user frustrations and accusations of unfairness, when the recovery framework was interpreted as forcing early redeemers to forfeit their remaining claims. One contributor on the Drift governance forum called the related Insurance Fund vote “effectively an attempt at money laundering.”

Will the DFX redemption rate rise?

The pool set up to repay victims of the Drift Protocol exploit was designed to only grow; the redemption rate never falls. Money enters once a day at 00:00 UTC from Velocity's Net Protocol Revenue at tiered rates:

• 60% of the first 30,000 USDT of daily revenue
• 70% up to 100,000 USDT
• 90% of anything above that, until deposits total the full verified loss

Unclaimed DFX tokens when the window closes at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028, will be burned. That burn rule feeds back into the valuation formula itself: with USDT value defined as pool balance divided by tokens outstanding, each burn shrinks the denominator while the daily deposits keep adding to the numerator — the two published levers holders tracking the rate over the window can watch.

Tether has pledged up to 127.5 million USDT, while other strategic partners have committed up to 20 million USDT. Those commitments carry caps and will be released in phases according to a preset schedule. Even at their full caps, the pledges sum to roughly 147.5 million USDT — about half of the verified $295.4 million loss — so under the published structure the remaining distance is covered by the daily revenue share and the fourth funding stream.

Any additional funds recovered from the stolen total form a fourth funding stream, though that source is less predictable.

As of Drift's September 30 update, $9.2 million of the stolen funds had been frozen after the attacker routed funds through Tornado Cash in August. Three of the four Ethereum wallets still hold 107,165 ETH of the stolen crypto and have not moved in months. Any recovery of those assets would enter the recovery math through that fourth stream, the least predictable of the four inputs.