Drift Exploiter Moves Over $100M in Ether to Tornado Cash Mixer
On Wednesday, an Ethereum wallet linked to the Drift exploit transferred 18,800 Ether, valued at approximately $46 million, to the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash.
The attacker moved $61 million worth of Ether to Tornado Cash on Tuesday, bringing the total amount sent over two days to 44,510 ETH, or about $109 million, according to blockchain analytics firm Onchain Lens on X.
These transfers to Tornado Cash complicate the ability to track the stolen funds, accounting for nearly 37% of the $295 million siphoned from the Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift in April. DefiLlama ranks this incident as the third-largest crypto hack this year.
Data from Arkham reveals that wallets flagged as connected to the Drift exploiter still hold 56,569 Ether, worth roughly $138 million, even after several transfers on Wednesday.
Drift, a decentralized exchange operating on the Solana blockchain, disclosed losses of around $295 million from the hack on April 1. Its cybersecurity advisor, Mandiant, attributed the breach to a North Korean threat group.
On October 1, Drift initiated claims and redemption for DFX recovery tokens. This allows affected users to file claims against a recovery pool initially funded with about $3.1 million and sustained by exchange fees and recovered assets.
The ongoing large transfers to Tornado Cash highlight the difficulty in tracing stolen crypto assets and underscore the importance of recovery programs like Drift's DFX tokens to help victims reclaim some losses.
Why it matters
Tracking these sizeable Ether movements to mixers emphasizes the challenge of recovering stolen crypto funds and highlights Drift's efforts to compensate affected users through tokenized claims.
Prepared from the source material with AI-assisted editing and checked against the supplied facts.
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