Solana proposes retiring durable nonces after the Drift hack

The feature that let signed transactions wait for weeks was central to the exploit that drained at least $270 million from Drift in April Solana’s developers want to kill off a feature that lets a signed transaction sit in a drawer, unsent, for weeks. That feature is called durable nonces, and it was the mechanism attackers relied on to drain at least $270 million from trading protocol Drift in April. How a feature became an attack vector Think of a normal Solana transaction as a concert ticket with a very short shelf life. Each one carries a stamp tied to a recent block, known as a blockhash. That stamp makes the transaction expire after about 30 seconds, now that the network produces blocks every 200 milliseconds. If you sign something and don’t send it quickly, it becomes worthless paper. Durable nonces swap that short-lived stamp for one that doesn’t go stale. A transaction signed with a durable nonce can stay valid indefinitely, waiting for someone to broadcast it. That flexibility has real uses. Custodians and exchanges that sign transactions offline, often across multiple parties and secure machines, can’t always hit a 30-second window. Durable nonces gave them breathing roo...