Solana moves to retire transaction feature after Drift hack

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Solana retires transaction feature

Highlights

Solana's draft proposal SIMD-0723 aims to require transactions to use recent blockhashes, retiring durable nonces after activation, and targets mainnet activation after 2027-05-05.
Durable nonce transactions represented only 3% of Solana traffic in June but generated 30% of priority fees, with 555 accounts responsible for 97.5% of such transactions.
Custodians and exchanges using air-gapped signing must migrate to alternatives like Anza’s Programmatic Signer or Blueshift’s Vector, but these present risks regarding failed transaction authorizations remaining valid.

Proposal timeline and technical rationale

As reported by CoinDesk, the draft proposal known as SIMD-0723 was filed on Nov. 5 by Gabe Rodriguez of Anza, the company behind Solana’s main validator software, and seeks to require every transaction to use a recent blockhash after activation.

On Solana, standard transactions expire after about 30 seconds because they are tied to a recent block. Durable nonces replace that time-limited stamp with one that remains valid indefinitely, allowing a transaction signed well in advance to be executed later.

The feature is widely used in cases where approvals are created on air-gapped machines that stay offline, making the signing and submission process slower than the normal transaction window. But the same design also allowed attackers in the Drift incident to hold signed approvals for more than a week before using them to empty the platform on April 1.

The proposal does not cite Drift directly in its formal argument and instead points to longstanding technical issues, including a 2022 event in which a failed transaction was processed through both the blockhash and nonce paths, stopping mainnet for about 4.5 hours. The draft says the feature will not be activated on mainnet-beta before 2027-05-05, while the Solana Foundation’s separate migration conditions could delay that cutoff further.

Custody impact and replacement risks

Only a relatively small set of users appears likely to bear most of the operational impact. In one June measurement period, durable nonce transactions accounted for about 3% of Solana traffic but generated 30% of all priority fees, with 555 accounts sending 97.5% of those transactions, according to data cited from researcher Max Resnick.

The proposal identifies custodians and exchanges using air-gapped signing as a distinct affected group. For those users, suggested replacements include on-chain programs that verify offline signatures, with Anza’s Programmatic Signer and Blueshift’s Vector named as possible options.

Those alternatives carry their own risk because a failed execution does not necessarily cancel the underlying authorization. That means a custody operation that sees a transfer fail cannot assume the signed approval has expired or been revoked, leaving firms to redesign controls around transaction submission and authorization management.

The proposal still requires approval from at least one engineer at Anza and one at Firedancer, the validator client developed by Jump, before it can be merged.

Our earlier article on Cohere’s planned acquisition of AI cybersecurity startup AISLE outlined how the deal would add software vulnerability detection to Cohere’s broader AI business being built alongside its merger with Aleph Alpha. We noted that AISLE’s tools focus on finding and fixing bugs in widely used software, positioning the combined group to strengthen enterprise and public-sector security offerings as AI-driven threats evolve.

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