On August 14-15, 2021, Ref Finance was exploited when a faulty security hotfix failed to properly validate and debit users' LP token balances when removing liquidity from pools. This allowed attackers to withdraw more tokens than they should have, extracting approximately 507K NEAR and 1M REF tokens worth ~$3.2M.

The NEAR ecological decentralized exchange Ref.Finance team tweeted that at around 2 pm UTC on August 14th, the Ref team noticed the abnormal behavior of the REF-NEAR trading pair, and then discovered that the patch of the recently deployed contract An error, which has been exploited by multiple users, affected approximately 1 million REFs and 580,000 NEARs.