Skyward finance, an IDO platform that enables fair distribution of tokens for projects on the NEAR Protocol, has allegedly been breached for 1.1 million NEAR tokens, worth an estimated $3 million at press time.
The news was shared on Twitter by Aurora Lab’s community moderator, Sanket Naikwadi, who claimed that the exploit was first noticed by a member of the NEAR protocol community, who calls himself “Near Scout”.
the @skywardfinance was just exploited for ~1.1M $NEAR Tokens (Worth ~3M) .
Thnx to @NearScout for noticing the treasury drain, he pinged me asking if something is wrong with skyward… then we looked into contract txns and found out about the exploit and his txns.
smol
— SankΞt â“ƒâš¡ï¸ | sanketn81.near ,sanketn81.lens (@sanket_naikwadi) November 2, 2022
According to the series of tweets about the exploit, Ref finance — a community-driven multipurpose DeFi platform built on the NEAR Protocol — and the Skyward team have been notified of the theft.
Apparently, the attacker started the heist by buying lots of Skyward tokens on Ref Finance, and “then redeemed them through Treasury at Skyward Finance”, where it seems that “got lots of NEAR than 1 SKYWARD was worth.”
Naikwadi warned SKYWARD token holders to redeem or exchange their tokens where they can, and to no longer interact with Skyward Finance, adding that the “hacker has already withdrawn NEAR to many different wallets.”
If you’re a SKYWARD Token holder redeem/swap wherever you can and no longer interact with Skyward Finance.
Hacker has already withdrawn NEAR to lots of different wallets.Huge shoutout again to @NearScout.
also, Shoutout to @pikespeak_ai it helped a lot in identifying the txns— SankΞt â“ƒâš¡ï¸ | sanketn81.near ,sanketn81.lens (@sanket_naikwadi) November 2, 2022
Exploits within the DeFi ecosystem appear to be on the rise. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis recently labeled October 2022 as “the biggest month of the biggest year in history for hacking activity.”
On October 12, Cointelegraph reported that $100 million worth of cryptocurrency was drained from Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange Mango Markets, causing its token to plunge 52%. On the same day as the Mango Market attack, TempleDAO was also attacked for $2 million.
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