The Near Protocol X account hack has turned out to be a marketing gimmick by its team for NEAR’s upcoming hackathon.
On September 5, NEAR officials posted a message on X saying that, “around 2:25 this morning, the official X account of NEAR Protocol was attacked, and the hacker posted a series of posts criticizing the crypto ecosystem. The post also informed that after investigation, some of the posts have not been deleted”.
The post read, “The security team led by security expert Mike Rotch conducted a thorough review of the incident and found that this was an isolated account hijacking incident and no one attempted to phish the NEAR community through malicious links, contract addresses or other means.”
After the tweets, another Near official tweeted that Near’s X account was renamed ‘Scam’ as the firm pulled out a marketing gimmick to promote a hackathon.
However, crypto twitter has called out this publicity stunt, some criticizing the platform for turning a marketing campaign into a cringefest especially after Near’s discord channel was compromised some days before. While others found ‘the boy who cried wolf stunt’ a ’10/10 marketing’ effort.
Near’s hackathon is to kickoff from 5th September 4pm UTC onwards, and the final submission deadline would be October 25. The submissions will be judged from October 25–November 8. For more information on other hackathons, check out our list of upcoming blockchain hackathons.
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