Drift Protocol Rebrands to Velocity DEX After $280M Exploit Linked to Lazarus Group

Drift Protocol suffered a major exploit on April 1, 2026 that resulted in losses exceeding $280 million and has been attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group; the attack compromised multisig wallets across 31 transactions, affected eleven dependent DeFi protocols, and caused TVL to fall from over $550M to roughly $217M. The project is rebranding to Velocity DEX, backed by a $127.5M credit line from Tether (switching to USDT), and plans to compensate users via a token-based recovery mechanism that has drawn criticism; the DRIFT token is near its all-time low and trading halted since the platform went offline.