Morning Minute: NEAR Intents Hacked for $3.8M - Was It A Bullish Hack?

NEAR Intents, a privacy-focused tool for swapping crypto across blockchains, experienced an exploit on Thursday that let an attacker withdraw roughly $3.8 million. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT followed the stolen funds to KuCoin, reporting they were converted into bitcoin. The NEAR Intents team notified law enforcement and said it will publish a full incident report. The vulnerability was located in the layer that handles moving assets in and out and how that layer interfaced with the main contract holding user funds. Core contract code was patched and primary services were brought back online within about an hour. However, deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks — among them BNB Chain, Polygon and Optimism — stayed offline for an additional ~12 hours while the remainder of the remediation was completed. NEAR Intents has handled significant volume during the recent privacy-focused market surge, reporting more than $30 billion in swaps across 35 networks. The exploitation knocked the NEAR token down nearly 9% to $4.86, and shares of the newly launched Bitwise NEAR ETF fell over 7%. The fund had launched two days earlier, meaning the hack occurred within the ETF’s first week. Team communication and remediation drew attention: the incident was identified, the contract vulnerability was publicly named, services were paused, a patch was deployed quickly, law enforcement was engaged, and the team committed to reimbursing affected users. The relatively contained financial impact and rapid response have led some observers to compare the event to previous “benign” discoveries of vulnerabilities — sparking debate over whether this episode could ultimately be reputationally neutral or even positive for NEAR. Follow-up actions noted by the team include a forthcoming full report on the incident. Until that report is released and any recovery or legal actions conclude, the broader implications for NEAR’s ecosystem and cross-chain privacy tooling will remain under observation.