NEAR Intents Exploited for $3.8M, Deposits and Withdrawals Paused

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading protocol, was hit by a security exploit that resulted in approximately $3.8 million in losses on Thursday. The platform paused services and temporarily disabled deposits and withdrawals on multiple blockchains. The project attributed the incident to a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The contract-side vulnerability has been patched, and NEAR Intents said it will fully reimburse affected funds.

The native token NEAR was down about 6% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing, according to CoinDesk. The disclosed vulnerability affected the cross-chain infrastructure rather than the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain. NEAR Intents is designed to simplify cross-chain trading by letting users specify desired swaps while independent market makers, called solvers, compete to execute them. Its website claims over $30 billion in processed volume across 35 blockchains.

The exploit adds to a difficult year for crypto security. Last week, exchange Bitget suffered an exploit resulting in over $350 million in stolen assets, according to CoinDesk. Other major incidents include Liquid Network with about $320 million, Drift with $295 million, and Kelp with $293 million, based on DefiLlama data. These figures highlight the growing frequency and scale of attacks on crypto platforms.

NEAR Intents reported the incident to law enforcement and is collaborating with security and blockchain analytics firms to trace the stolen funds. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the exploit started with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents. He added that the stolen funds were sent to crypto exchange KuCoin and then bridged into bitcoin, according to CoinDesk.

The platform expects core services to resume quickly, but deposits and withdrawals on several networks will remain unavailable for a longer period while fixes are completed. Its status page listed issues affecting BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll, and Plasma. The incident underscores the persistent vulnerabilities in cross-chain infrastructure.