China’s central bank plans to investigate Solana-linked activities in mainland China after authorities stopped planned community events, according to the PBOC-backed Financial News. The move came as Solana developers separately proposed removing a transaction feature that attackers used during the April Drift breach. The security proposal sets May 5, 2027, as the earliest activation date. The developments involve separate regulatory and security issues.
Financial News reported Friday that the People’s Bank of China had halted recent offline gatherings linked to Solana. The bank also planned to examine the people and organizations behind those events. The report cited an unnamed official and gave no indication that Beijing would ease its restrictions.
The publication described Solana as a platform that issues the SOL token. It also linked the network’s technical services to cryptocurrency and stablecoin activity, including USDT. CoinMarketCap ranked SOL as the seventh-largest cryptocurrency at the time. Financial News did not name investigation targets.
The Solana Foundation had planned meetings in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Beijing from October 16 through October 22. Organizers intended to discuss blockchain infrastructure, artificial intelligence, payments, and other uses. Authorities later disrupted the program.
On October 16, participants struggled to enter the Shanghai venue, and the gathering did not proceed. Reports described officers at the location while registered guests waited outside. Organizers cited logistical problems and promised revised arrangements.
Following the Shanghai cancellation, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao questioned whether event planners understood China’s cryptocurrency restrictions. In a post on X, he also referred to a similar interruption involving Solana in Shenzhen less than a year earlier.
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu gave another reason for the postponement. In an October 16 post, she said publicity had caused registrations to rise fourfold overnight. She cited crowd size, while Financial News later reported official intervention. The two accounts emerged at different stages of the dispute over the gatherings.
The accounts offered different explanations for the Shanghai disruption. The PBOC-backed report added a regulatory dimension by saying authorities would investigate the participants and organizing entities.
China already restricted cryptocurrency activity. The Financial News account did not announce any easing of those controls. Instead, it identified Solana’s token issuance and connections to cryptocurrency trading as central issues for the authorities.
Meanwhile, Solana developers have proposed retiring durable nonce transactions, which allow signed transfers to remain valid long after their approval. Standard transactions use a recent blockhash and normally expire after roughly 30 seconds under the network conditions described. Durable nonce transactions avoid that short deadline.
That flexibility helps exchanges and custodians. Their teams often sign transfers on air-gapped computers, then send them to the network later. That process can take longer than the normal transaction validity window. Yet the same extended window featured in the April 1 attack on trading protocol Drift.
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Attackers obtained approvals in advance, held the signed transactions for more than a week, and then drained at least USD 270 million. Drift later attributed the breach to a North Korean state-affiliated group. What happens to these approval processes when durable nonce support ends?
Gabe Rodriguez of validator software firm Anza filed proposal SIMD-0723 on November 5. It would require recent blockhashes for every transaction after activation. The draft does not cite Drift; instead, it references earlier bugs, including a 2022 incident that stopped Solana’s mainnet for about four and a half hours.
The proposal rules out activation before May 5, 2027, and gives users at least six months to migrate. However, the foundation’s separate public guidance still has no fixed cutoff date. It ties the transition period to replacement readiness, so the actual change could occur later.
China’s central bank has moved to investigate Solana-linked events after disruptions in Shanghai and other planned mainland activities. Separately, developers want to end durable nonce transactions following security concerns and earlier network failures. Their proposal allows migration time and rules out activation before May 2027.