$3M NEAR tokens lost post Skyward Finance hack

Sahana Kiran
NEAR
Source – Unsplash

It seems like ‘Hacktober’s’ energy has been passed on to November as well. Just as the entire community was waiting to see volatility spur up following the FOMC meeting, NEAR Protocol’s Skyward finance encountered a rather expensive attack.

It was brought to light that Skyward Finance, a platform that looks into token distribution for projects on the NEAR protocol was hit with a $3 million attack. About 1.1 million NEAR tokens were reportedly drained from the project.

The attack was noticed by an individual who goes by Near Scout who alerted the community about the same. Ref Fund, a community-led multi-purpose DeFi platform built on the NEAR Protocol, and the Skyward team have reportedly been informed of the drain. Here’s how the hack occurred.

This process was reportedly repeated a couple of more times until wNEAR from the treasury was not redeemed. However, the firm failed to pause the occurrence as the treasury contracts were locked and inaccessible to the Skyward team as well.

A community member further wrote,

“If you’re a SKYWARD Token holder redeem/swap wherever you can and no longer interact with Skyward Finance.”

In the meantime, the native token of the firm, SKYWARD witnessed a drastic drop of 88 percent. This took the price of the asset from a high of $12 to a low of $1.56. NEAR on the other hand was up by 3 percent over the last 24 hours.

Will November beat ‘Hacktober’ in terms of hacks?

October emerged as the month with the highest number of hacks all year. Around $3 billion in digital assets were stolen until last month in 2022.

November has just started and the industry already encountered two major attacks. Just yesterday, prominent crypto exchange Deribit was exploited for a whopping $28 million.

With Skyward Finance being attacked along with Deribit, several dread the possibility of a repeat of October.