A breakdown of the Drift Protocol relaunch under a new name: hybrid liquidity from JIT auctions, a decentralized order book (DLOB) and a virtual AMM, USDT settlement and an insurance fund fully owned by stakers. The platform runs in a closed beta with whitelist access.
Velocity is the relaunch of Drift Protocol — the largest perpetuals exchange on Solana, halted after the April 1, 2026 hack. The team rebuilt the protocol as a new program deployment with a reduced feature set and a hardened administration model.
KeyForDEX on-chain analysts' assessment: We examine the three liquidity sources (JIT auctions, the DLOB, the vAMM), the Borrow & Lend module with the Amplify product, the 100% staker-owned insurance fund, contract risk tiers and the differences between the new architecture and the Drift v2 codebase — including the removed durable-nonce attack vector.
The open-source velocity-v1 monorepo, a registry of verified program addresses (Velocity and Velocity Vaults), the tiered admin-key model and Pyth oracles.
An honest picture of the audit coverage: Trail of Bits and Neodyme reports for the pre-fork codebase, the status of OtterSec's review of Velocity's own deployment and the bug bounty program.
A monitoring framework: which metrics (TVL, volume, OI, the insurance fund) to track after the public launch and where to get data while the platform is in closed beta.
The developer portal: TypeScript and Rust SDKs, the Data API, SWIFT off-chain signed orders, DLOB WebSocket streams and the keeper-bot infrastructure.
An objective comparison of Velocity with the leading perpetual DEXs: execution architecture, security, fees and liquidity maturity.
Positioning against Hyperliquid, dYdX and the archived Drift Protocol: what changed after the rebrand, how the new architecture differs from its predecessor and what the closed-beta risks are.
A consolidated comparison of Velocity with all top DEX platforms: TVL, maker/taker fees, maximum leverage, MEV protection and capital efficiency.
Velocity is the successor of Drift Protocol: trading on the old domain stopped after the April 1, 2026 incident, and the v2 codebase became the foundation of the new deployment. The incident chronology and technical breakdown are in theDrift Protocol archive review; a detailed side-by-side comparison of the two architectures is inVelocity vs Drift Protocol.