Migrating from Drift

Velocity Protocol is a fork of Drift Protocol v2, taken at Drift SDK v2.163.0-beta.0. It is not an upgrade of Drift in place. It is an entirely new on-chain program deployment with a new program ID, a reduced feature set, and its own renamed SDK. The Drift program is paused, and no on-chain state carries over: user accounts must be re-initialized and balances start fresh on Velocity.

Because the program ID changed, every PDA address is different from Drift: even for the accounts whose seeds are byte-for-byte unchanged (user, user_stats, perp_market, spot_market, spot_market_vault, insurance_fund_vault). One trading seed was also renamed: the State PDA seed went from drift_state to velocity_state. Never reuse a Drift-derived address on Velocity.

At a glance

Quote asset is now USDT

This is the single most money-relevant change. On Drift, spot market 0 (the cross-margin quote and collateral asset) is USDC. On Velocity mainnet-beta it is USDT.

Both USDC and USDT are 6-decimal SPL tokens, so notional amounts look identical and nothing type-checks differently. An MM that funds accounts with USDC (as on Drift) is depositing the wrong token: deposits, withdrawals, ATA derivation, collateral, and settlement all reference the USDT mint. Switch every quote-mint hardcode and associated-token-account to USDT on mainnet (dUSDT on devnet); never assume QUOTE_MINT_ADDRESS == USDC. Read the mint from getConfig().QUOTE_MINT_ADDRESS rather than hardcoding it. See Setup for the config accessor.

Removed features

Several Drift subsystems were dropped. Their SDK exports are gone (no back-compat), and their on-chain error variants are preserved only as deprecated, code-stable stubs.

New on Velocity

Velocity also adds subsystems Drift never had. In brief:

• VLP module: a new liquidity-pool / vAMM-hedge component (programs/velocity/src/vlp/).
• Isolated perp positions: per-position isolated collateral. The instructions are feature-gated out of mainnet builds pending audit; the state layout is present in every build.
• Builder codes: the change_approved_builder instruction, a RevenueShare escrow account, and ReferrerStatus.BuilderReferral = 4. See Builder Codes.
• Per-user equity floor: update_user_equity_floor plus the equity-floor breaker instructions and a User.equity_floor field.
• Tiered admin keys: the single State.admin is split into cold_admin / warm_admin / hot keys / pause_admin.
• Continuous funding dead zone: a per-market funding clamp threshold and ramp slope.
• Per-market funding-bias spread widening: an opt-in vAMM spread widen on the funding-paying side.
• Fast-fill auctions: the DLOB server can force fast, marketable auctions (see below).
• Protocol fee redesign: fees are re-routed (a three-way AMM / IF / protocol split) rather than changing the taker rate you pay.

Behavior changes to review

These are semantic changes a compiler cannot catch: a port that builds cleanly can still mispredict on-chain behavior. Ordered by impact for a market maker.

• Quote asset is USDT (mainnet). See above. Wrong-token deposits are the highest-severity failure mode.
• Fast-fill auctions (DLOB server v3). At API version ≥ 3, every market gets isFastFill = true: the auction starts inside the touch (bestOffer with a -0.05 price offset) and lasts 2000 ms of wall clock, converted to slots at the market’s active slot duration (5 slots at the 400 ms baseline, more at a shorter slot duration). Auctions become marketable almost immediately, so an MM quoting off stale prices gets run over. Derive the auction window from the live slot duration rather than hardcoding 5 slots, and use the new generatedAt response field for staleness checks.
• Trigger orders priced at their post-trigger price. The Rust DLOB library (velocity-rs, used by fillers and keeper bots) now rewrites a resting trigger order’s book price to the computed post-trigger auction price (clamped to the limit price for TriggerLimit), instead of tagging it with its raw trigger price. If you consume that DLOB or services built on it, stop assuming a resting trigger order’s book price equals its trigger price.
• AMM JIT dropped from match fills under a hard gate. When a hard AMM gate is active (pause, drawdown, MM-oracle volatility, or oracle invalidity), a DLOB match fills DLOB-only. AMM JIT no longer tops it up. Fills can be capped to the resting maker’s size during those windows. Don’t assume AMM JIT backstops a DLOB match.
• MM-oracle native writes are throttled. update_mm_oracle_native silently skips the write (returns Ok, no error) on a non-positive price, a sequence id that has not strictly increased, a slot that has not advanced, a resubmit inside an 800 ms write gap, or a source slot more than 800 ms away from the landing slot in either direction. A per-write price step beyond 1% is handled differently: it is not skipped, it is clamped to the 1% cap and written, so a crank feeding a large move converges over a few writes rather than freezing the oracle. MM crank bots that push updates faster than the 800 ms gap, or with a stale/mismatched source slot, get silent skips with no error signal. Throttle writes to at least 800 ms apart and expect an oversized step to land clamped, not rejected.
• Funding floor raised 7.3% → 10.95% annualized. The always-applied funding floor/ceiling is ~1.5× higher (the offset denominator dropped 5000 → 3333). The SDK mirror is in sync, so re-pull and re-model funding carry on any perp inventory.
• Fee cost changes for referred and staked users. The gov-token stake discount is gone. Perp fee tier is now based on 30-day volume, floored by the admin-set State.promo_fee_tier (0 means no floor), so an MM that staked for a discount now pays the tiered fee for its volume, or the promo floor if higher. Separately, VelocityClient.getMarketFees now subtracts the referee discount from the taker fee when the client’s UserStats shows the referred bit, and User.calculateFeeForQuoteAmount is renamed User.calculatePerpTakerFee (gaining an optional builderInfo arg and rounding predicted fees up rather than down). Re-model taker fees without any stake benefit; expect the discounted/augmented value.
• MarketStatus discriminants shifted. Drift’s four now-removed pause variants sat between Active and ReduceOnly, so ReduceOnly / Settlement / Delisted were 6 / 7 / 8. On Velocity they are 2 / 3 / 4. The IDL/Anchor-based SDK decode is fine, but any custom raw-byte decoder will silently misclassify market state. Rebuild raw decoders against the new discriminants.
• Bulk order margin is tighter. place_orders / place_scale_orders now accumulate risk across the batch and check initial margin once per touched risk scope (cross plus each isolated market), instead of only gating the last order at maintenance margin. Batches that previously slipped a risk-increasing order past a weak gate now revert with InsufficientCollateral. Size batches against initial margin.
• Deposits and transfers enforce per-market admission. Same-market transfer_deposit (and the delegate variant) now applies the full deposit/withdraw admission logic (active status, max_token_deposits, reduce-only cap), and direct deposit() now respects the per-market Deposit pause bit independently of the global deposit pause. Transfers into a capped, non-active, or reduce-only market, and deposits into a market with only the per-market deposit bit paused, now revert where they used to succeed. Pre-check spot-market status and caps.

Data API: Drift-only columns

The Data API’s Trades/Market Trades tables drop the spotFulfillmentMethodFee column (external spot fulfillment is removed), and the Funding Rates table drops periodRevenue and baseAssetAmountWithUnsettledLp (vAMM LP shares are removed). One entire table has no Velocity equivalent:

LP (BAL), Drift-only, no Velocity equivalent. Drift’s vAMM LP shares (PerpPosition.lpShares and the addLiquidity/settleLiquidity actions below) were removed entirely on Velocity. There is no per-user LP-share mechanism to emit these events. Liquidity provision against a market now happens through the separate VLP module (a hedge-pool architecture configured per-market via PerpMarketAccount.hedgeConfig), which has its own accounting and does not map onto this table.

See the Data API glossary for the full current column reference.

SDK surface

The headline renames a TypeScript integrator hits first: there are no back-compat aliases, so these surface as build errors:

• DriftClient → VelocityClient
• DRIFT_PROGRAM_ID → VELOCITY_PROGRAM_ID
• DriftEnv → VelocityEnv
• Account subscribers: webSocketDriftClientAccountSubscriber(V2) → webSocketVelocityClientAccountSubscriber(V2), pollingDriftClientAccountSubscriber → pollingVelocityClientAccountSubscriber, grpcDriftClientAccountSubscriber(V2) → grpcVelocityClientAccountSubscriber(V2)
• Config field USDC_MINT_ADDRESS → QUOTE_MINT_ADDRESS
• Order.oraclePriceOffset / OrderParams.oraclePriceOffset widened from number to BN: wrap raw numbers in new BN(...)
• Removed root exports include PythSolanaReceiver and WormholeCoreBridgeSolana: importing either from the package root now breaks

Note also that the IDL account names are PascalCase (e.g. PerpMarket, SpotMarket, User). Pass those exact names to the account coder.

For the exhaustive symbol tables and a step-by-step procedure your AI coding agent can execute, see the AI Agent Migration Guide.

Scope & currency

This page reflects @velocity-exchange/sdk 0.13.0 (August 2026) and covers the TypeScript SDK. Rust (velocity-rs) and raw-ABI integrators should consult docs/DRIFT-TO-VELOCITY.md in the velocity-v1 repository, which is the canonical layout-and-ABI reference.