NEAR Intents Loses $3.8M in Exploit as Crypto Hack Losses Grow

NEAR Intents temporarily halted parts of its cross-chain trading platform after an exploit resulted in roughly $3.8 million in losses on Thursday.

The incident prompted the protocol to suspend deposits and withdrawals on several supported blockchains while it investigated the breach. NEAR Intents said all affected losses would be reimbursed.

The project said the root cause was a bug involving the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and a NEAR Intents smart contract. The contract-level vulnerability has been patched.

Cross-Chain Infrastructure Was Affected

NEAR Intents is designed to streamline swaps between blockchain networks. Users only need to specify the transaction they want, while independent market makers, referred to as solvers, compete to execute the requested swap without users having to select a bridge, exchange or routing path themselves.

The protocol says its system has processed more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains.

NEAR Intents said the vulnerability was limited to its cross-chain infrastructure and did not affect the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain.

The NEAR token was trading around $4.94, down approximately 6% over the previous 24 hours at the time of publication.

Attack Adds to Growing List of Crypto Exploits

The breach comes after several large crypto security incidents this year.

Bitget reported an exploit last week involving more than $350 million in stolen assets. DefiLlama data also points to major incidents involving Liquid Network, which lost about $320 million, Drift with approximately $295 million and Kelp with roughly $293 million.

NEAR Intents said it reported the incident to law enforcement and is coordinating with cybersecurity and blockchain analytics firms to track the stolen funds.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said suspicious withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet tied to NEAR Intents marked the beginning of the exploit. He said the attacker subsequently moved the assets to KuCoin and then transferred them across networks into Bitcoin.

Withdrawals Remain Suspended on Several Chains

NEAR Intents said it anticipated restoring its primary services quickly, although deposits and withdrawals on certain networks would remain unavailable for a longer period while the necessary fixes were completed.

Its status page listed disruptions on BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma.

With the vulnerable contract patched, the protocol said it is continuing its investigation, working to trace the stolen assets and preparing full reimbursement for users affected by the exploit.