Solana Durable Nonce Faces Retirement After $270M Drift Hack
Solana developers want to retire the Solana durable nonce, the feature attackers used to steal at least $270 million from Drift in April. The proposal, SIMD-0723, was filed on November 5, according to CoinDesk. It still needs technical approval. If it passes, it would not take effect before May 5, 2027.
What the Solana durable nonce does
A normal Solana transaction carries a recent blockhash, so it expires fast. CoinDesk puts that at about 30 seconds on today’s 200-millisecond blocks. A durable nonce swaps that stamp for one that never goes stale. As a result, a transaction signed today can still go through next month.
Custodians and exchanges use this because their approvals are signed on air-gapped machines. Moving a signature to the network can take longer than 30 seconds. The Drift attackers used the same gap. CoinDesk says they had approvals signed in advance and let the transactions sit for more than a week before they emptied the platform on April 1. Drift later blamed a North Korean state-affiliated group. That is Drift’s attribution, not a court finding.
What the Solana durable nonce proposal says
The draft was filed by Gabe Rodriguez of Anza, the firm behind Solana’s main validator software. It says: “After activation, every transaction needs a recent blockhash.” Notably, it does not mention Drift. It builds its case on years of bugs, including a 2022 incident where a failed transaction halted mainnet for about 4.5 hours.
The date is soft. The draft says the feature “will not be activated on mainnet-beta before 2027-05-05”. However, the Solana Foundation’s page says removal is expected roughly six months after a replacement is ready, so the cutoff could slip. Anza’s Programmatic Signer and Blueshift’s Vector are the two replacement candidates. The proposal also needs sign-off from at least one engineer at Anza and one at Firedancer.
Who feels the change
Few users do, but they pay a lot. CoinDesk cites researcher Max Resnick: durable nonce transactions were about 3% of traffic in one June period but paid 30% of priority fees. Just 555 accounts sent 97.5% of them. The draft also warns that a failed replacement transaction can leave an authorization usable. Therefore a custody desk cannot treat a failed transfer as a cancelled one.
What it means for bitcoin miners
Solana is proof of stake, so none of this touches mining revenue. The lesson is about custody. Convenience features become attack paths, and the cost lands on holders. We keep our own coins off exchange accounts for that reason. Our bitcoin price prediction page covers the market side.
Miner math: bitcoin hashprice today
Here is the live maths on November 9. Bitcoin is $74,656 and the network is 968 EH/s, so hashprice is about $35.03 per petahash per day. That is what one PH/s of hashing earns before power.
| Machine | 5c/kWh | 8c/kWh | 12c/kWh | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19 (95 TH/s, 3250 W) | -$0.57 | -$2.91 | -$6.03 | 4.3c |
| Antminer S19k Pro (115 TH/s, 2645 W) | $0.85 | -$1.05 | -$3.59 | 6.3c |
| Antminer S19 XP (141 TH/s, 3010 W) | $1.33 | -$0.84 | -$3.73 | 6.8c |
| Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s, 3510 W) | $3.98 | $1.46 | -$1.91 | 9.7c |
Numbers are profit per day after electricity, at the three power prices shown. Break-even is the most you can pay per kilowatt-hour before the machine loses money. Specs are the manufacturer ratings; network data comes from mempool.space. Try your own power price in our free bitcoin mining profit calculator. See what these machines really sold for in our used ASIC miner price index. Want to run the same numbers on a machine you can buy today? See our used ASIC miners, or buy several at once through bulk lots.
If another big hack knocked bitcoin down 3%: the break-even power price on an S19k Pro falls from 6.3 to 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. At 8 cents, daily profit goes from -$1.05 to -$1.17.
Think of that as a stress test, not a forecast. Hacks hurt sentiment first and margins second. Know your break-even power price before the next scare. Our mining economics guides show how.
If a machine fails your math, sell us your used miners. Buyers can see all miners.
-Nick
ING Mining
This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and exchanges can fail. Please do your own research.
How this story was made: drafted with the help of AI tools from public sources, then edited by Nick Squires. See our editorial policy. Spot an error? Email ns@ingmining.com.