NEAR Intents was hit by an exploit that caused approximately $3.8 million in losses Thursday, prompting the cross-chain trading protocol to pause its services and suspend deposits and withdrawals across several blockchain networks.
The platform said it intends to make affected users whole.
NEAR Intents said the attack was linked to a bug in the way its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with a smart contract used by the protocol. The vulnerable contract has since been patched.
Bug Affected Cross-Chain System
NEAR Intents allows users to execute swaps across multiple blockchains without having to manually determine which bridge, exchange or routing option to use.
Instead, users state the transaction they want to complete, while independent market makers known as solvers compete to fulfill the request.
The protocol’s website says NEAR Intents has processed more than $30 billion in volume spanning 35 blockchains.
The project said the security issue was confined to its cross-chain infrastructure and did not represent an exploit of the underlying NEAR Protocol.
NEAR, the native token of the broader ecosystem, was down around 6% over 24 hours at the time of publication, trading near $4.94.
Exploit Adds to String of Major Crypto Breaches
The incident comes as crypto companies and protocols continue to face large-scale security attacks.
Bitget was hit by an exploit the previous week that resulted in more than $350 million worth of assets being stolen. According to DefiLlama, other significant incidents included roughly $320 million in losses at Liquid Network, $295 million at Drift and $293 million at Kelp.
NEAR Intents said it has contacted law enforcement and enlisted blockchain analytics and security firms to help trace the stolen assets.
ZachXBT said the attacker initially carried out suspicious withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet connected to NEAR Intents. He reported that the funds were subsequently moved to KuCoin and then bridged into Bitcoin.
Multiple Networks Affected
NEAR Intents said its main services were expected to resume relatively quickly, although deposits and withdrawals on certain networks would remain offline for additional work.
The protocol’s status page identified problems affecting BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma.
With the contract vulnerability patched, NEAR Intents said it would continue investigating the incident, tracking the stolen assets and processing full reimbursement for affected users.
