NEAR Intents suspended services on Oct. 1 after a bug in its smart contract infrastructure led to roughly $3.8 million in losses. The protocol patched the vulnerability and pledged full compensation, while blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the stolen funds were already moving through an exchange toward Bitcoin.
NEAR Intents halted services on Oct. 1 after a security incident, with the cross-chain swap protocol putting preliminary losses at about $3.8 million. The protocol attributed the incident to a bug in how its Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract.
According to NEAR Intents: "These funds will be compensated in full." The team said it had patched the contract-side vulnerability and expected NEAR Intents and near.com operations to resume within about an hour of the statement.
NEAR Intents runs on a smart contract that credits deposited tokens to accounts in its ledger and updates those records as swaps settle, while withdrawals to external blockchains move through cross-chain token bridges.
Eleven Networks Face Longer Restrictions
Deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks — BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma — would stay unavailable for roughly 12 additional hours while Omni infrastructure repairs continued, the protocol said. Users already holding assets from those chains inside NEAR Intents, including through HOT wallet or near.com, would be able to swap them into other assets once the service restarted.
The outage interrupted a system that handled about $4.8 billion in swap volume over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama.
Funds Move Fast After the Breach
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the stolen funds were transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin soon after the exploit, before NEAR Intents had finished addressing the incident publicly. NEAR Intents is a multichain settlement protocol built around intent-based transactions.
NEAR Intents has reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds. The announcement left out transaction hashes and a token-by-token breakdown of the loss, and the team said a detailed report would follow in the coming days.
Sources: The Defiant, Bitcoin.com News, Crypto Briefing
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