NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service built on NEAR Protocol (NEAR), lost about $3.8 million to an exploit on Thursday. The NEAR token fell 8.6% within hours, although the underlying blockchain was not named as the target.
The hack landed two days after Bitwise opened the first US spot NEAR exchange-traded fund (ETF). Bitwise pitched that fund partly on NEAR Intents, which it says has processed over $32 billion in swaps.
How the NEAR Intents Hack Happened
NEAR Intents lets users swap a token on one blockchain for a token on another. Users state the trade they want, and outside market makers compete to fill it.
The team said a bug caused the loss. The flaw sat in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract, the self-running code that records each swap.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT flagged the attack, saying the service’s hot wallet on BNB Chain, an online wallet used to pay out withdrawals, saw several unusual outflows before it stopped processing transactions.
The stolen funds went straight to crypto exchange KuCoin and were converted into Bitcoin (BTC), according to ZachXBT.
NEAR Intents said it has patched the contract flaw and will compensate affected users in full. It has also reported the incident to law enforcement.
Is NEAR Protocol Safe After the $3.8 Million Hack?
Deposits and withdrawals remain paused for about 12 more hours on 11 networks. These include BNB Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll, and Plasma.
Neither the official statement nor ZachXBT’s alert reports any loss from the NEAR blockchain itself. Both point to the swap service’s bridge and its BNB Chain wallet.
Users holding assets from the paused chains inside NEAR Intents can still swap them into other tokens once core service resumes, the team said.
Meanwhile, NEAR traded at $4.92 at press time, with a market value near $6.4 billion. The token had climbed about 175% in September ahead of the Bitwise NEAR ETF launch.
It is the second major exploit in the NEAR ecosystem this year, after Rhea Finance lost $7.6 million in April. NEAR Intents has promised a full technical report in the coming days.