NEAR Intents Loses $3.8M in Exploit, Promises Full Reimbursement

A security exploit on Thursday cost the cross chain trading platform NEAR Intents about $3.8 million. It paused services and temporarily disabled deposits and withdrawals on several blockchains. The team says a bug in the way its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract caused the incident. The contract flaw has been patched, and affected funds will be reimbursed in full.

How NEAR Intents Works

Users state the swap they want, and independent market makers called solvers compete to complete it, so no one has to pick a bridge or route. The platform says it has handled more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains. The NEAR token fell about 6% in 24 hours, though the flaw involved cross-chain infrastructure, not the NEAR Protocol blockchain.

Tracing the Stolen Funds

NEAR Intents reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with security and analytics firms. Investigator ZachXBT said the attack began with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to the platform. The funds then went to KuCoin and were bridged into bitcoin.

Networks Still Affected

Core services are expected back soon, but deposits and withdrawals will stay down longer on BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma.

DefiLlama data shows a rough year for security. Bitget lost over $350 million last week, Liquid Network about $320 million, Drift $295 million and Kelp $293 million.