Solana developers propose retiring durable nonces, the feature behind the $270 million Drift hack, with no switch-off before May 2027

An engineer at Solana developer firm Anza has proposed switching off one of the network's oldest special cases. The draft, SIMD-0723, filed on November 5 and still awaiting sign-off from engineers at Anza and Firedancer, would retire durable nonces, a feature that lets a signed transaction wait indefinitely instead of expiring about 30 seconds after it is created.

Exchanges, custodians and stablecoin issuers use the feature to sign transfers on offline computers and route them through long approval chains. Attackers used it too. In the April 1 exploit of trading protocol Drift, which took at least $270 million, they held pre-signed approvals for more than a week before submitting them, Cryptowisser reports.

The Solana Foundation lists other reasons, including replay bugs, outages and spam; the draft cites a 2022 incident that halted the network for about four and a half hours, Cryptowisser reports. In one epoch in June 2026, nonce transactions were 3.1% of transactions but 30% of priority fees, and 555 fee payers sent 97.5% of them.

Two replacements are being built: Anza's Programmatic Signer, now on a test network before its audit, and Blueshift's Vector. Both check an offline signature inside an onchain program. The draft says activation can come no earlier than May 5, 2027. Institutions have asked for 6 to 12 months after a replacement reaches mainnet.