Nimiq has temporarily disabled stablecoin transactions that rely on Gas Abstraction across its ecosystem while investigating a security issue connected to its OpenGSN integration. The precautionary shutdown affects Gas Abstraction in Nimiq Wallet and Nimiq Pay, rather than disabling stablecoin holdings or every possible stablecoin transaction at the network level. The project said the restriction will remain in place while its team investigates the underlying issue.
In an official announcement, Nimiq said it was investigating an OpenGSN-related security issue that could affect Gas Abstraction and had therefore suspended the relevant stablecoin transactions. Nimiq has not yet published a technical post-mortem identifying the precise vulnerability, attack path or confirmed financial impact. The team said further information would follow as its investigation progresses.
We are currently investigating an OpenGSN-related security issue that may also affect Gas Abstraction.
As a precaution, all Stablecoin transactions using Gas Abstraction have been temporarily disabled across the Nimiq ecosystem, including Nimiq Pay and Nimiq Wallet.
We’re sorry…
— Nimiq — $NIM 🤝 (@nimiq) September 17, 2026
OpenGSN Sits Behind Nimiq’s Gas Abstraction
Nimiq introduced OpenGSN-based Gas Abstraction to remove the need for stablecoin users to separately hold Polygon’s native gas token. Its Wallet supports USDC and USDT on Polygon, with the abstraction layer handling transaction fees behind the interface. The design was intended to make stablecoin payments feel closer to conventional transfers by hiding the requirement to acquire and manage a separate gas asset.
OpenGSN works through relayers, paymasters and forwarding contracts that allow a third party to submit a signed transaction and cover the blockchain gas cost under predefined conditions. Nimiq’s implementation converts that cost into the stablecoin payment flow. That architecture creates additional contract and authorization boundaries that must operate correctly even though users retain custody of their own assets. Similar efforts to simplify gasless stablecoin transfers illustrate how fee abstraction has become a broader usability objective across blockchain payment systems.
Importantly, the current evidence does not establish that OpenGSN itself suffered a protocol-wide compromise. The security boundary under investigation appears to involve how Nimiq’s Polygon swap and HTLC contracts interacted with OpenGSN’s relaying architecture, making it more precise to describe the incident as affecting Nimiq’s OpenGSN integration rather than OpenGSN generally.
Security Trackers Report a $50,463 Exploit
While Nimiq’s announcement did not disclose losses, external security monitoring indicates that an exploit occurred on Polygon on September 16. SlowMist’s incident tracker reports approximately $50,463 in USDC, USDT0 and USDC.e was removed after an attacker exploited authorization behavior involving Nimiq’s contracts. That loss figure remains third-party analysis and has not yet been confirmed by Nimiq in its public statement.
According to the security analysis, the affected contracts could be induced to process forged requests associated with a liquidity wallet that had existing token approvals. The reported attack therefore concerns contract authorization and the gas-abstraction execution path, not a compromise of the Polygon blockchain or Nimiq’s Layer 1 consensus. That distinction is material when assessing the actual scope of the incident.
The immediate operational response is now clear: Gas Abstraction for stablecoin transactions remains unavailable across the affected Nimiq interfaces while the review continues. The next milestone will be Nimiq’s technical post-mortem and confirmation of whether the reported $50,463 loss is accurate, followed by details of any contract remediation and the conditions required before Gas Abstraction is restored.
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