NEAR Intents hit by $3.8 million exploit as crypto's rough year of hacks continues

NEAR Intents disclosed a security exploit on Thursday that resulted in roughly $3.8 million of losses and led the cross‑chain trading platform to suspend core services and restrict deposits and withdrawals on several blockchains. The project traced the problem to a bug in the way its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract; NEAR Intents said it has patched the contract vulnerability and will reimburse affected funds in full. NEAR Intents, which aims to simplify cross‑chain swaps by matching user orders with competing independent market makers called solvers, said it has processed over $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains. Although the disclosed issue related to the platform’s cross‑chain infrastructure rather than the NEAR Protocol itself, the NEAR token was trading about 6% lower over the prior 24 hours at the time of the report. The project reported the breach to law enforcement and engaged security and blockchain analytics firms to trace stolen funds. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT reported that the exploit began with unusual withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents; according to the investigator, the stolen funds were later sent to exchange KuCoin and converted into bitcoin. NEAR Intents said it expected core services to resume quickly but warned that deposits and withdrawals on a list of networks — including BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma — would remain unavailable while fixes continued. The incident follows a wave of high‑value crypto breaches this year, with recent losses at other platforms reported in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to DefiLlama data.