A wallet linked to the Drift exploit deposited 23,000 ETH into Tornado Cash on Oct. 20, worth about $54.8 million. Five Etherscan-labeled Drift exploiter wallets still hold about 84,164 ETH while recovery efforts continue.
A wallet that PeckShield identified as linked to the Drift exploit deposited 23,000 ETH into Tornado Cash on Oct. 20, according to Ethereum transaction records The Defiant reviewed. The transfers were worth about $54.8 million at CoinGecko's ETH price of $2,381.59 at 5:01 a.m. ET.
Deposits arrived in 100 ETH batches
The active address carries Etherscan's "Drift Exploiter 5" label. Its transaction history shows 230 deposits of 100 ETH each between 3:08:35 a.m. and 4:58:11 a.m. ET on Oct. 20. The last transaction in that batch routed 100 ETH through the Tornado Cash router into its 100 ETH pool.
Those deposits move the funds into a privacy protocol built to obscure the link between deposits and later withdrawals, which complicates tracing for recovery efforts. However, about 84,164 ETH, worth roughly $200 million at the same price, remained in the five wallets Etherscan labels as Drift exploiters in a snapshot around 5 a.m. ET. That includes about 2,714 ETH in the wallet making the deposits. These are native ETH balances in the labeled addresses, not a complete accounting of stolen assets or funds withdrawn from the mixer.
Earlier mixing and the recovery pool
Drift, a Solana trading protocol, reported about $295.7 million in assets stolen in the April 1 attack. The latest deposits follow an earlier round of mixing. The Drift Foundation said on Sept. 30 that one wallet had sent about 23,094 ETH into Tornado Cash on July 23.
Mixing does not necessarily put the money beyond recovery. In that September update, the foundation said about $9.2 million in stolen funds had been frozen after the attacker moved funds through Tornado Cash in August. Frozen funds are not the same as money returned to users, and the foundation said recovering them involves law enforcement and takes time.
Drift opened claims and redemptions for its DFX recovery token on Oct. 1. Under its published terms, holders can burn DFX for a proportional share of the USDT recovery pool, and any stolen funds recovered through freezes, the bounty program or law enforcement go into that pool.
Source: The Defiant
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