NEAR Intents halted services after a $3.8M exploit, then confirmed it is back online with impact limited to USDT on BSC.
NEAR Intents News
NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading protocol, suffered a security incident that caused about $3.8 million in losses. The team halted the platform's services after detecting the breach on Oct. 1, then restored them once the flaw was patched.
The company said the incident came from a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The flaw let an attacker drain funds before the team could respond.
Contract Flaw Already Patched
NEAR Intents said on X that the preliminary loss estimate stands at approximately $3.8 million. The team added that all affected funds will be compensated in full.
The contract-side vulnerability has been fixed, according to the company. NEAR Intents and its website, near(dot)com, were expected to resume normal operations within about an hour of the announcement.
Eleven networks remained restricted for longer. Deposits and withdrawals on BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma remained unavailable for roughly 12 more hours while the team finished repairs to the Omni infrastructure.
People holding assets from those networks inside NEAR Intents, including through the HOT Wallet app or on near(dot)com, were able to swap them into other assets once the main platform came back online.
Impact Was Limited to USDT on BSC
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin later confirmed that NEAR Intents and near(dot)com were back online, though services on a few affected networks remained restricted. He said the exploit's impact was confined solely to USDT on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC).
The NEAR core protocol, the NEAR token, and other applications on the network were not affected by the incident, Polosukhin said. He reiterated that users affected by the exploit will be fully compensated.
NEAR Intents lets users complete cross-chain trades without picking a bridge or exchange themselves. Independent market makers known as solvers compete to fill each requested swap. The platform has processed more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains, according to its website.
The native token of the NEAR Protocol blockchain, NEAR, fell about 6% over 24 hours following the news, even though the exploit affected NEAR Intents' cross-chain infrastructure rather than the underlying blockchain.
Further Reading: NEAR Intents Blocks Over $50M Tied to Bitget Hack
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the breach began with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet tied to NEAR Intents. He said the stolen funds were sent to the KuCoin exchange and then bridged into Bitcoin (BTC).
NEAR Intents said it has reported the incident to law enforcement. The team is working with security firms and blockchain analytics partners to trace the stolen funds and pursue their recovery.
The incident follows a difficult stretch for crypto security this year. Other major 2026 breaches include a roughly $350 million exploit at exchange Bitget and a nearly $320 million incident at the Liquid Network, a Bitcoin-linked network.
NEAR Intents said it will publish a detailed report on the incident in the coming days. The team did not specify whose funds were affected by the breach.
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