Drift Foundation has teamed up with Bybit to launch a $29.5 million bounty aimed at recovering funds stolen in the April exploit of Drift Protocol. The bounty represents 10% of the roughly $295.4 million drained from the Solana-based protocol on April 1, a loss that made up more than half of Drift’s total value, according to foundation updates.
The foundation confirmed that $9.2 million has been frozen after the attacker began using Tornado Cash in August. However, most of the stolen funds remain unrecovered more than six months after the incident, and on-chain tracking shows the assets are still being laundered. In July, a wallet tagged “Drift Exploiter 4” moved 23,095.1 ETH, worth around $44.4 million at the time, into Tornado Cash across July 23 and 24. Earlier, the group had sent just 0.85 ETH to Bybit deposit addresses before the large mixer transactions began.
The exploit was executed through a fake token scheme that let the attackers withdraw USDC, SOL, and ETH after taking control of the protocol. Before the theft, the scammers reportedly posed as a quantitative trading firm, held face-to-face meetings with Drift contributors, and deposited more than $1 million. Independent investigator ZachXBT has since stopped tracking the funds, saying the effort was “difficult for a team and not feasible for a single person.”
The update also drew a comparison from Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, who said she is not optimistic about recovering the $388 million stolen from Bitget. Chen pointed to Bybit’s February 2025 hack, in which $1.5 billion in Ether was taken but only about $80 million was frozen or recovered. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously said nearly 28% of those stolen funds had gone dark by April 2025 after moving through mixers and cross-chain bridges; Bybit later sued North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau, and the Lazarus Group.
For Bitget, the initial loss was reported at $352 million before Chen clarified the actual figure was $388 million. The exchange has offered a 5% bounty on frozen and recovered funds. So far, the NEAR Intents team has blocked more than $50 million linked to the incident and frozen about $500,000, while Tether and Circle blacklisted a wallet holding $318,013 in stablecoins. Wallets connected to the hack have also moved roughly $3.9 million in ZEC into Zcash’s Ironwood shielded pool.
The bounty initiative highlights growing collaboration between protocols and exchanges on security and recovery, though the slow progress in both the Drift and Bitget cases underscores how difficult it remains to reclaim stolen crypto once it enters mixers and shielded pools.
