Drift Protocol secures nearly $150M in recovery funding from Tether and partners as it drops USDC for USDT

Tether will inject up to $127.5 million into Drift Protocol as part of a recovery plan totaling nearly $150 million following the platform’s recent exploit that led to about $285 million in user losses, the company announced Thursday.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino hinted at the positive developments earlier today.

Today will be a good day for DeFi

— Paolo Ardoino 🤖 (@paoloardoino) April 16, 2026

The plan is designed to support user recovery and facilitate Drift’s relaunch on Solana.

The structure ties repayments to ongoing trading activity, with platform revenues contributing to user recovery as operations resume. Further funding will be deployed gradually and linked to performance, aligning recovery with usage rather than upfront capital injections.

Drift also plans to shift its settlement assets from USDC to USDT as part of the relaunch, onboarding more than 128,000 users and ecosystem participants. The move is expected to increase liquidity and reinforce USDT’s role in the Solana-based trading infrastructure.

This is a developing story.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.