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RECOVERY

Drift victims can claim DFX now

Each DFX represents one verified USDT lost, but redeeming now pays only about one cent per dollar and permanently burns the token.

By Lorde BuildsOctober 4, 2026 · 4 min readUpdated October 2, 2026
Drift victims can claim DFX now. Forest-green headline on cream beside the official Drift icon and an engraved fork between a small immediate USDT pool and uncertain later recovery.
Reference-guided generated editorial artwork with Drift's official icon composited for identification. The forked pools illustrate the choice between redeeming now and retaining a claim on later deposits.

Drift has opened claims for people who lost money in its April exploit.

For every verified USDT lost, the user receives one token called DFX. That sounds like one DFX might repay one dollar. It does not.

At launch, redeeming one DFX returned about 0.0104 USDT. In plain English, a person with 1,000 dollars of verified losses could claim 1,000 DFX, but immediately redeeming all of them would return only about 10.40 dollars at that opening rate.

The token gives users a choice: take the small recovery now, sell DFX to someone else, or hold it and wait for more money to enter the recovery pool.

What DFX represents

DFX is a recovery token. It records a user’s share of Drift’s recovery plan.

The total allocation is fixed at one DFX for every verified USDT lost in the April 1 incident. Drift says no new DFX can be minted.

The redemption value uses a simple formula:

money in the recovery pool ÷ DFX still outstanding

Newsrooms observed about $3.11 million in the opening pool against roughly 299.5 million DFX of fixed supply. That is why the opening redemption value was close to one cent, not one dollar.

The live dashboard did not render reliably in our research tool, so those figures need a fresh browser check before publication.

The decision is permanent

Claiming DFX and redeeming DFX are different actions.

  • Claim: the affected user receives the DFX allocated to the wallet that controlled the Drift account on April 1.
  • Redeem: the holder exchanges DFX for USDT from the recovery pool.
  • Sell: the holder transfers DFX through a secondary market such as Raydium.
  • Hold: the holder keeps a share of any later pool deposits.

When someone redeems, the DFX is burned, which means it is permanently removed. The holder receives the current USDT amount and gives up any future recovery tied to those tokens.

The burn also means later deposits are shared among fewer remaining DFX.

Where future money could come from

Drift says the pool can grow through four routes:

  1. Velocity revenue: between 60% and 90% of daily net protocol revenue goes to the recovery pool, depending on the daily amount.
  2. Tether support: Tether committed up to 127.5 million USDT for the relaunch and user recovery.
  3. Other partners: strategic partners committed up to 20 million USDT.
  4. Recovered assets: frozen or recovered stolen funds can be added after the required legal process.

The words up to matter. The Block reported that those partner commitments had not appeared in the opening recovery pool. A commitment is not the same as money already available for redemption.

Future Velocity revenue is also unknown. Drift’s formula can make the redemption amount rise as money arrives and supply falls, but it cannot guarantee how much money will arrive or when.

What affected users should check

  • The claim must use the wallet that controlled the affected Drift account on April 1.
  • A small amount of SOL is needed for the network transaction fee.
  • Drift says the claim window closes at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028.
  • The separate Insurance Fund claim has different terms. It is not DFX.
  • The quoted redemption amount should be checked immediately before approving a transaction.
  • Fake recovery links are an obvious risk. The official update points to dfx.drift.trade.

DFX does not erase the loss. It turns the remaining recovery into a token that can be claimed, traded, redeemed or held. The difficult part is deciding whether a small certain payment today is worth giving up an uncertain claim on tomorrow.

Sources and reporting notes

Checked October 2, 2026. Claim rules, supply, revenue bands, the burn mechanism and the January 2028 deadline come from Drift’s official DFX guide. The Block and Unchained independently checked the launch and reported the opening pool and redemption value.

The dynamic recovery dashboard showed conflicting zero values in our text reader. The opening numbers are attributed to the official guide and independent newsroom observations, not presented as a live quote at publication time.