Cross-chain service pauses 11 networks after exploit

TLDR

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading protocol, halted services and paused deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks after a roughly 3.8 million dollar exploit.

1. The exploit stemmed from a bug between NEAR Intents Omni deposit-withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contract, letting an attacker drain about 3.8 million dollars before services were stopped.
2. The protocol says users will be fully reimbursed, but deposits and withdrawals on 11 chains like BNB Chain and Polygon are suspended while infrastructure repairs and investigations continue.
3. The incident underscores security risk in cross-chain and intents systems, so upcoming post-mortems, fund recovery attempts, and any changes to security architecture are important signals for crypto users.

Deep Dive

1. Exploit And Service Pause

Reports say the cross-chain trading platform NEAR Intents suffered a security exploit of around 3.8 million dollars after a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal layer interacted with its main smart contract.

Once irregular outflows were detected from a BNB Chain hot wallet, the team halted services and stopped deposits and withdrawals, describing the issue as an infrastructure-level interaction bug rather than a direct failure of the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain.

The contract-side vulnerability has been patched, and core services on NEAR Intents and near.com were expected to resume relatively quickly, with cross-chain infrastructure repairs taking longer.

2. User Impact And Reimbursement

According to multiple reports, NEAR Intents pledged to compensate affected users in full and contacted law enforcement and blockchain analytics firms to trace the stolen funds, which an investigator said were sent to KuCoin and bridged into bitcoin, as noted by Decrypt.

During repairs, deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks, including BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, ethereum/">Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma, remain paused for roughly 12 hours, though users can still swap assets held inside the system once main services resume, per a TokenPost incident notice.

NEAR, the associated blockchains token, fell moderately on the news in spot and ETF markets, reflecting both direct concern about the exploit and broader sensitivity to security incidents in cross-chain infrastructure.

3. Broader Cross-Chain Risks

This exploit adds to a growing list of attacks on bridges and cross-chain systems, highlighting that complex routing layers and intents architectures can fail at integration points even when external defenses look strong, as emphasized in industry coverage.

Centralized liquidity pools and hot wallets that span many chains create attractive single points of failure; a bug in one interaction can ripple across multiple networks, forcing broad pauses like the 11-chain suspension here.

For crypto users, the key signals to watch are NEAR Intents promised post-mortem, any concrete fund recovery, updated audits, and whether other cross-chain protocols tighten their own security and monitoring in response.

Conclusion

A relatively small but serious exploit forced NEAR Intents to stop services and isolate 11 networks while it patched a critical infrastructure bug and pledged full reimbursement.

The event shows that cross-chain convenience still carries concentrated technical risk, and that even well-used routing layers can be undermined by subtle contract interactions.

How thoroughly NEAR Intents and peers respond with transparent root-cause analysis, stronger safeguards and clear user protections will shape confidence in the next generation of cross-chain and intents-based systems.