On April 2, Drift Protocol was hacked for over $280M. Over the following six hours, the attackers moved more than $230M in USDC through Circle's CCTP protocol — from the Solana network to Ethereum across more than 100 transactions. Circle, the centralized issuer of USDC, took no action to freeze the funds during that entire window.
What Happened
On-chain detective ZachXBT published a breakdown of the incident, noting that Circle had six hours to block the stolen funds. The attack began around noon ET, and throughout that period USDC moved freely between blockchains.
According to ZachXBT, Circle not only failed to respond to the hack in real time — 15 hours after the initial breach, the attacker transferred another $2.5M in USDC from Solana to Ethereum and immediately swapped it for 1,196 ETH.
In September 2024, Circle did freeze two addresses linked to the Lazarus hacker group, locking around $1.5M in USDC — but only months after Tether and other issuers had already done the same.
Community Reaction
Delphi Digital co-founder Tommy Shaughnessy wrote that Circle has centralized freezing mechanisms but simply chose not to use them.
"There is not a single scenario where the Circle team sits down and says: 'Yeah, let the money flow to North Korea — sounds reasonable.' And yet they don't freeze the funds. It's just absurd for a company that calls itself a regulated issuer," Shaughnessy wrote.
ZachXBT argued that Circle hides behind the words "compliance" and "regulated issuer" when dealing with regulators, while failing to build any real incident response infrastructure.
"They don't care until it hits their revenue," he added.
To support his claim, the analyst noted that shortly before the hack, Circle had frozen more than 16 business hot wallets that turned out to be operational — and the company is still in the process of unfreezing them.
ZachXBT also highlighted a pointed detail: Drift was one of Circle's first partners when CCTP launched on Solana in 2023.
"Why would any crypto business build on Circle's infrastructure if a project with a nine-figure TVL got zero support during a major incident?" he wrote.
Circle has not issued an official statement on the situation. As observers on X noted, while the scandal was unfolding, the company's official account was posting content about its Arc product.