Solana software engineers want to eliminate a capability that permits a signed transaction to remain unsubmitted for weeks—the exact mechanism that malicious actors leveraged to siphon at least $270 million from the Drift trading protocol in April.
Every standard Solana transaction includes a marker linked to a current block, designated as a blockhash, which causes it to expire after approximately 30 seconds given that the network operates 200-millisecond blocks. In contrast, a system called durable nonce trades that marker for one that never expires, meaning a transfer authorized today can still execute next month.
Custodial services and trading platforms depend on this extended buffer because their authorizations occur on air-gapped equipment—a description for computers isolated from the internet—where transmitting a signature to the blockchain network can exceed the 30-second limit.
This arrangement also benefited the Drift hackers, who obtained authorizations beforehand and let those transfers linger for upwards of a week prior to utilizing them to drain the exchange on April 1. Drift subsequently attributed the security breach to a state-sponsored North Korean collective.
The improvement draft advocating for the removal of the feature, designated SIMD-0723, was submitted on November 5 by Gabe Rodriguez representing Anza, the organization responsible for Solana’s primary validator codebase.
“Following activation, every transaction will require a recent blockhash,” the document states. The submission does not reference Drift, instead building its argument around historical software flaws, such as a 2022 event where “a failed transfer was processed via both the blockhash and nonce mechanisms, causing the mainnet to pause for roughly 4.5 hours.”
The draft also establishes the initial timeline for an initiative the Solana Foundation revealed in October.
“The capability will not be enabled on mainnet-beta prior to 2027-05-05,” it specifies, offering participants “a minimum of six months to transition, measured from the publication of this improvement document on 2026-11-05.” The Foundation’s official deprecation page currently maintains the note “No date set” and initiates the six-month countdown only after an alternative is finalized, which could push the deadline further back.
What changes
A limited demographic will experience the majority of the impact. Durable nonce transactions accounted for roughly 3% of Solana network activity during a June observation window while generating 30% of all priority fees, the supplementary payments users attach to secure faster processing.
Merely 555 wallets generated 97.5% of those transactions, according to metrics compiled by researcher Max Resnick.
Resnick’s analysis does not identify the operators of those accounts, characterizing the function instead as being “hijacked for durable nonce spam.” The improvement proposal identifies custodians as a distinct impacted segment.
“This encompasses custodians and trading desks utilizing air-gapped signing methods, where validation procedures exceed that timeframe,” the text notes.
Their substitute would involve an onchain application capable of verifying an offline signature, with Anza’s Programmatic Signer and Blueshift’s Vector identified as potential solutions. These applications introduce distinct vulnerabilities, and the draft cautions that “an unsuccessful execution can leave an authorization active, meaning a failed submission does not act as a revocation.” A custody provider observing a failed transfer cannot assume the underlying authorization has been invalidated.
The proposal still requires formal approval from at least one developer at Anza and another at Firedancer, the competing validator software developed by Jump, before integration can proceed.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/11/09/solana-moves-to-scrap-the-transaction-feature-used-in-the-usd270-million-drift-hack.
