NEAR Intents loses $3.8 million in cross-chain exploit
A bug between the Omni deposit system and NEAR Intents smart contract led to a $3.8M loss; the project paused services and promised full repayment.
By Priya Nair · Published · Updated · 6 min read
Cross-chain trading platform NEAR Intents lost about $3.8 million to an exploit on Thursday and paused services, disabling deposits and withdrawals on several blockchains, CoinDesk reports.
What went wrong
The project blamed a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The flaw has been patched, and the team says affected users will be reimbursed in full. One investigator said stolen funds were sent to KuCoin and converted to bitcoin — a common laundering pattern, since bitcoin's liquidity makes it easy to move value off-chain quickly.
The pause of deposits and withdrawals across several chains suggests the team was unsure how far the flawed logic reached. That is a familiar pattern in cross-chain incidents: because one contract talks to many networks, a single bug can expose funds on all of them at once, so operators freeze everything until they can prove each connection is safe.
How NEAR Intents works
NEAR Intents lets users say what swap they want — for example, turning tokens on one chain into tokens on another — while independent "solvers" compete to complete it across chains. The platform says it has handled more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains, making it one of the larger pieces of cross-chain infrastructure in crypto.
That design is powerful but concentrates risk. Users' funds pass through shared contracts and solver infrastructure, so a flaw in the plumbing can affect people who never interacted with the buggy component directly.
Market impact
The NEAR token fell 8.6% to $4.92 within hours, just two days after its first US spot ETF launched, BeInCrypto reported. The underlying NEAR blockchain itself was not the target — the exploit sat in the application layer built on top of it — but traders rarely make that distinction in the first hours of a hack.
The timing is awkward for the project. A spot ETF brings mainstream scrutiny, and a multimillion-dollar exploit days after launch hands skeptics an easy headline about crypto's security record.
Why cross-chain systems keep getting hit
Bridges and cross-chain services connect systems with different security rules. Every connection point is a place where one side can be tricked into trusting a message it should not. They have been behind many of the largest DeFi losses in recent years, from the Ronin and Wormhole bridge hacks to this year's string of smaller exploits.
The core problem is complexity: a cross-chain protocol must correctly verify events that happened on another network, and each supported chain adds new edge cases. Auditors struggle to model every interaction, and attackers only need to find one.
What happens next
The team's promise of full reimbursement will now be watched closely. In past incidents, repayment pledges have ranged from prompt and complete to slow and partial, and the difference usually comes down to the size of the project's treasury. Users should expect a formal post-mortem and a claims process; anything less would be a red flag.
What users should do
- Withdraw idle funds from cross-chain services instead of leaving balances there.
- Follow only the project's official channels for repayment details — fake "claim" sites usually appear within hours.
- Review and revoke old token approvals with a tool such as Revoke.cash.
- Treat any unsolicited "NEAR Intents refund" message as a scam until proven otherwise.
