Mike Hale Velocity, the Solana perpetuals exchange rebuilt from Drift, opened its public beta to everyone on September 21, 2026. You can post wBTC, wETH, SOL, and USDT as collateral in a single account, take up to 20x on select perps, and pay 2 bps for a limited time, on code that OtterSec audited and Velocity open-sourced five days earlier.
What you can do on Velocity now
Velocity is a perpetual futures exchange, so you deposit collateral, open leveraged long or short positions on the markets it lists, and every position settles on-chain in USDT. The protocol is narrowed to perps, with spot markets there to serve as collateral and borrow-lend rather than as a venue of their own.
wBTC, wETH, SOL, and USDT all count as margin in the same account, so you can hedge with the crypto you already hold instead of selling into stables first to open the short. A SOL holder who wants downside protection funds the account with SOL and shorts the SOL perp against it, in one place, with no conversion step.
Fees are 2 bps, the lowest tier Velocity charges, running for a limited time with no announced end date. The referral program pays you 20% of the fees generated by anyone you bring in, and Velocity says that share does not expire when the beta does.
Velocity ran the closed beta from August 25 behind a whitelist.
Private beta (Aug 25) | Public beta (Sep 21) | |
|---|---|---|
Access | Select partners and traders | Open to everyone |
Collateral | SOL, USDT | wBTC, wETH, SOL, USDT in one account |
Max leverage | Not disclosed | Up to 20x on select perps |
Fee tier | 2 bps from first trade | 2 bps, limited time |
Audit status | In progress | Published, no critical findings |
Source code | Closed |
Velocity kept the external interface largely the same through the rebuild, so market makers and integrators can keep their existing code running against it.
Velocity is Drift, rebranded and rebuilt
Drift lost roughly $285 million on April 1, 2026, in a social-engineering attack that reached at least 20 other Solana protocols with exposure to it, according to Chainalysis. Velocity forked the protocol and rebuilt rather than patching what was there.
The April attack ended with the attackers holding admin control, so that is where the rebuild focused. It now sits in tiers, each with its own multisig:
A cold admin handles program upgrades and counts external security parties among its signers
A warm admin handles parameters
Bots and cranks run on low-risk hot wallets
A pause admin can halt the program in an incident
The critical multisigs are time-locked on top of that. A privileged instruction cannot execute until its delay expires, which gives everyone watching a window to catch it before it lands.
OtterSec reviewed everything built after the fork and found no critical issues, and every high finding is fixed in the deployed code. Velocity published the full report and put the source on GitHub, fixes included, so anyone can read the code they are trading on.
Asymmetric Research reviewed operational security alongside the audit, and the exchange is now going through the Solana Foundation's STRIDE security review.
"Trust is earned. We build in the open, as every DeFi protocol should; the on-chain economy should not be a black box. While we build in the open, every change that reaches users will be audited by an outside firm before reaching mainnet."
— Noah Prince, Head of Protocol, Velocity
The audit, the open repository, and the time-locked admin tiers give a trader something to verify before depositing, and they carry more weight than the 2 bps promo in deciding whether this beta holds its deposits.