Cross-chain service halts routes after $3.8M exploit

TLDR

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading service, halted routes after a roughly $3.8 million exploit caused by a bug between its Omni infrastructure and smart contract.

1. The exploit drained about $3.8 million, forced a full service pause, and cut deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks while a contract bug was patched.
2. The team pledged full reimbursement, said core NEAR Protocol (NEAR) was unaffected, but NEAR and its new ETF saw sharp intraday drawdowns.
3. Investigations, fund tracing, and a promised postmortem make this a key test of cross-chain security and recovery practices for similar intents platforms.

Deep Dive

1. What Happened In The Exploit

Reports say NEAR Intents lost about $3.8 million when a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal layer interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract let an attacker drain funds from infrastructure-linked wallets, particularly on BNB Chain (incident summary).

The team halted services and disabled deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks, including BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, ethereum/">Optimism, TON, Avalanche and others, while patching the contract vulnerability and working on Omnis systems (TokenPost coverage).

On-chain investigator ZachXBT reported irregular outflows from a NEAR Intents BSC hot wallet, with stolen funds sent to KuCoin and then bridged into Bitcoin, a path echoed in multiple reports (Cointelegraph recap).

2. Impact On Users And NEAR

NEAR Intents has publicly committed to compensating affected users in full, using treasury resources, and has already reported the incident to law enforcement while working with security and analytics firms to trace and recover funds (Decrypt write-up).

Illia Polosukhin later said NEAR Intents and near.com had resumed core service after the bug was fixed within about an hour, though some chains remained restricted, and stressed that the NEAR Protocol blockchain and NEAR token infrastructure were not directly compromised (Crypto.news update).

Even so, market perception took a hit: NEAR reportedly dropped around 79% intraday, and a newly launched Bitwise NEAR ETF also fell more than 7%, showing how cross-chain infrastructure incidents can spill into the associated assets narrative and liquidity (Yahoo Finance article).

3. What To Watch Next

The team plans a detailed public postmortem and says findings will drive stronger security, including more formal verification for contracts used in NEAR Intents-style automation (Crypto.news update).

This exploit came just days after NEAR Intents helped block about $50 million in laundering attempts tied to the large Bitget hack, highlighting both the value and fragility of cross-chain intents systems in current attack patterns (Decrypt context).

For crypto users, key future signals will be how quickly deposits and withdrawals on all affected chains return, whether stolen funds are meaningfully recovered, and what concrete integration and monitoring changes are adopted across similar routers and bridges.

Conclusion

A relatively small but high-profile $3.8 million exploit forced NEAR Intents to halt routes, making cross-chain infrastructure risk very visible despite NEARs base chain remaining intact.

How well the team executes reimbursement, recovery, and security upgrades will shape confidence not only in NEAR Intents but also in the broader class of cross-chain and intents services that sit between users and multiple networks.