NEAR Intents pauses services after $3.8 million smart contract exploit

$3.8 million lost as cross-chain swap protocol halts

NEAR Intents, a protocol that lets users swap crypto assets between different blockchains, shut down its services on Thursday, October 1, after an exploit caused approximately $3.8 million in losses, according to early reports from The Block.

The team said the cause was a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. A smart contract is a set of code on a blockchain that runs automatically when conditions are met.

Key facts at a glance

• Approximate loss: $3.8 million
• Cause: bug between Omni deposit/withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract
• Contract flaw: already patched
• Full compensation: promised by the team
• Deposits and withdrawals on 11 blockchain networks unavailable for roughly 12 more hours
• Post-mortem report: expected in the coming days

What the team said

In an X post, the NEAR Intents team said the contract vulnerability had been patched and that NEAR Intents and Near.com were expected to reopen operations within an hour. However, deposits and withdrawals on 11 blockchain networks, including BSC, Polygon, and Optimism, would remain unavailable for roughly another 12 hours.

The team pledged to fully compensate the lost funds and said it was already in contact with law enforcement agencies and blockchain analytics platforms to trace where the money went.

Where the stolen funds may have gone

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted on Telegram that the protocol's BSC hot wallet showed irregular outflows and that the stolen funds had been transferred to the KuCoin exchange and bridged into bitcoin. The Block reached out to KuCoin for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.

This fund-flow report has not been independently confirmed by an official source.

Why this matters for NEAR and its new ETF

The exploit came about a month and a half after NEAR reported that it had crossed $25 billion in lifetime volume moved through the platform. The timing also falls shortly after Bitwise launched the first U.S. spot NEAR ETF (ticker: NRR) with staking rewards just two days earlier.

An ETF is a fund that tracks the price of an asset and trades on stock exchanges. At the time of The Block's report, the NEAR token was down 6.7% on the day and trading at $4.96, while NRR was down 6.4%.

Sources

• The Block