Major Winner? Solana Perps GMTrade Gains Momentum Post-Drift Hack

Only three weeks after the $270 million Drift Protocol exploit, another Solana-based perpetual trading platform has captured much attention.

GMTrade, a perp trading protocol powered by the decentralized exchange GMX, has recorded a significant 61.8% surge in its total value locked (TVL), per DefiLlama data. As of April 1st, the project had a TVL of $16.11 million. However, the figure has now jumped to $27 million in 21 days.

Is this enough to position GMTrade as the top winner from the Drift exploit? Let’s see what the on-chain data says.

Major Winner from Drift Attack?

Comparing the TVL of both Solana perp trading platforms as of April 1st, a few hours before the hack, we see that Drift held an impressive $550.13 million, while GMTrade held $16.11 million.

Even at the time of writing, Drift’s TVL sat at $247.5 million, which is still significantly higher than GMTrade’s latest TVL of $27 million.

Despite the significant gap in their TVL metrics, this data shows that Solana traders who previously used the Drift Protocol have opted to trade perps on GMTrade rather than abandoning the layer-1 blockchain altogether.

Further evidence lies in the notable increase in active users and trading volume seen on GMTrade over the past three weeks.

DefiLlama’s data shows that GMTrade’s perp trading volume soared significantly following the Drift hack. As shown in the chart below, the protocol’s perp volume moved from around $2.598 billion in late March to a peak of $3.936 billion between April 6th and 12th. Its perp volume is currently $26.56 million.

Focusing on GMTrade’s active addresses, the Solana blockchain explorer Solscan shows that the Perp trading protocol has seen a notable increase over the past three weeks. On April 12th, for example, GMTrade had 5,200 active addresses. A few days earlier, the project’s X account revealed that the total addresses had soared to 10,000 traders.

Although small, its current record of 1,100 daily active addresses represents a 7.13% increase over the past 24 hours.

The record shows that while GMTrade did not garner as much money as Drift has, its steady increase in TVL, perpetual trading volume, and active addresses gives evidence that it is by far the top gainer from Drift’s debacle.

Way Back Up for Drift

Following its million-dollar attack, Drift halted deposits and withdrawals. Ever since, it has worked with various entities to recover the stolen funds.

Last week, leading stablecoin issuer Tether supported the troubled perpetual trading platform with $127.5 million to aid its recovery. Tether joined forces with the Solana Foundation and other partners to help Drift raise up to $150 million to bootstrap its business. This represents more than half of its stolen assets.

Recall that Circle came under fire shortly after the Drift hack for failing to help freeze USDC holdings in the hacker’s custody. Days later, a law group filed a class action lawsuit against Circle for aiding the hacker’s theft.

A Closer Look at GMTrade

Founded in 2024, GMTrade is a Solana-based perpetual decentralized exchange that allows users to trade crypto and real-world assets (RWAs). Its program was built using GMX’s V2 architecture.

In late 2025, the project rebranded from GMXSOL (GMX-Solana) to GMTrade. It currently ranks among the leading perpetual trading projects on Solana.

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