Pyra closes after Drift hack as Solana logs another $1B USDC mint

Solana is still attracting large stablecoin issuance, but the Drift fallout shows that liquidity on a chain does not fix user losses at the app level. Circle pre-minted another $1 billion in USDC on Solana, taking reported issuance on the network to $3.5 billion over the past week, according to Lookonchain. At the same time, payments app Pyra is shutting down after the Drift exploit.

Pyra said it has stopped taking new users and canceled existing payment cards. Users can still withdraw funds and export private keys through a web portal until Sept. 15, 2026. The company also said that portal may later be used to distribute Drift recovery tokens, if those tokens become available.

The underlying exploit happened on April 1 and was estimated by Elliptic at about $286 million, with suspected DPRK links. Elliptic said Drift's total value locked dropped from about $550 million to under $250 million after the attack, and that the stolen assets were swapped into USDC on Solana before being bridged to Ethereum.

Drift's own recovery update described $295 million in outstanding user losses over time and proposed a recovery pool plus a separate recovery token. That leaves Solana with two signals at once: strong demand for dollar rails, and an unresolved test of how users recover when a major app fails.