Organization Name – Skyward Finance

Category – Banking & DeFi

About

powered by irmaAI

In November 2022, Skyward Finance — a NEAR-ecosystem fundraising and auction platform based in San Francisco — was exploited for a reported $3 million. This is documented independently, not just claimed: Halborn published a technical writeup titled "Explained: The Skyward Finance Hack," and CoinTelegraph reported the loss at the time. Two additional QuillAudits-titled references exist in the record but carry no working links and can’t be independently confirmed.

No team member is named or verified anywhere in the registry. RMA™ status is Unverified across all seven… pillars. VBTransparencyScore 3.42 at the 20.66th percentile, ranked 67th of 98 in Banking and DeFi. Launched in 2021. The achievement log shows a specific, checkable governance response: a DAO Governance Launch logged in 2024, roughly two years after the exploit — a real institutional reaction, not merely a claim, though the log doesn’t specify what the new governance structure actually changed about security practices.

One naming caution worth flagging: a domain called skywardfinancial.org surfaces in media search results under the heading "Skyward in the News" — this appears to be an entirely unrelated financial-services company and should not be confused with Skyward Finance the NEAR protocol.

The post-exploit DeFi protocol safety evaluation question here is specific: a protocol that suffered a real, independently documented exploit and responded with a governance change two years later gives a reader something to actually evaluate — unlike a profile with no incident history at all, where there’s simply no test case to check the team’s response against. Read More