Velocity Replaces Drift: What Changes for Investors

The perpetuals venue Drift on Solana has been called Velocity since its relaunch, and since September 29, 2026 a different team has been running it. Co-founder Cindy Leow has stepped back from her role, five months after attackers pulled around 285 million dollars out of the exchange's vaults on April 1. For you this is more than a change of name: trading is now settled in USDT instead of USDC, several functions have disappeared, and there is still no MiCA authorization for the German market.

A perp DEX is a decentralized exchange for open-ended futures contracts where you bet on price moves with leverage without owning the coin itself. The money does not sit with a bank; it sits in smart contracts, the so-called vaults. Those vaults were exactly what the April attack went after.

Velocity replaces Drift: the relaunch in numbers

The way back came in stages. On September 17, 2026 the project opened up its source code. On September 21 the whitelist fell, which until then had let only selected accounts trade, and the public beta was open to everyone. On September 29 the change at the top followed.

Leow explained her departure on X by pointing to the phase the project is now in. Her strength, she said in substance, lies in building from zero to one, and Velocity now needs people who take it from one to ten; she trusts this team to do that. Five names are taking over: a lead for fund recovery and law enforcement, a protocol engineer who previously headed the Helium Network, a product chief with a Binance background, a partnerships lead and a growth lead who comes from Binance and Trust Wallet.