NEAR Intents halts services after $3.8 million exploit, promises full compensation

NEAR Intents, a protocol that lets users swap crypto across blockchains, halted services Thursday after an exploit led to losses of approximately $3.8 million, according to early reports.

In an X post, the team said the incident was caused by a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract.

It pledged to fully compensate the lost funds.

The contract vulnerability has been patched, and the team said NEAR Intents and Near.com were expected to open back up operations within an hour. However, deposits and withdrawals on 11 blockchain networks, including BSC, Polygon and Optimism, would be unavailable for roughly another 12 hours.

In his own post on Telegram, blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the protocol's BSC hot wallet showed irregular outflows and that the stolen funds were transferred to the KuCoin exchange and bridged to bitcoin (BTC).

The Block reached out to KuCoin for updates and comments but did not receive an immediate reply.

NEAR Intents said it was already in touch with law enforcement and blockchain analytics platforms to trace the funds and would be releasing a post-mortem report in the coming days.

This comes roughly a month and a half after NEAR reported that it had crossed $25 billion in lifetime volume moved through the platform.

The NEAR Protocol token (NEAR) is down 6.7% on the day and is trading at $4.96. It is also bad timing for those who jumped into Bitwise's NEAR ETF (NRR), which launched just two days ago. NRR is down 6.4% at the time of press, giving back all the gains and then some from Wednesday.