NEAR Intents halted parts of its cross-chain infrastructure Thursday after an exploit produced losses estimated at approximately $3.8 million.
The team attributed the incident to a flaw involving the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract. The vulnerable contract component has been patched, and the project said affected users will be fully compensated. The Block
Core trading was expected to resume relatively quickly, but deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks faced a longer interruption. The affected networks included BNB Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, TON, Monad, Scroll, Plasma and others. BeInCrypto
The available evidence does not indicate that the NEAR blockchain itself was compromised.
The incident instead affected infrastructure used by NEAR Intents to coordinate cross-chain deposits and withdrawals.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT reported irregular outflows from the protocol’s BNB Chain hot wallet and said stolen assets reached KuCoin before being bridged into Bitcoin. That attribution remains analyst reporting rather than a final forensic reconstruction from NEAR Intents. The Block
The timing is unusually sensitive.
NEAR Intents has processed more than $25 billion in lifetime cross-chain volume and featured prominently in Bitwise’s investment thesis when the first U.S. spot NEAR exchange-traded product launched earlier this week. NEAR fell roughly 7% following disclosure of the exploit. The Block
TOKEN RECON ASSESSMENT
The dollar loss is modest compared with the Bitget breach. The architectural lesson is more useful.
NEAR Intents is designed to simplify cross-chain execution by abstracting much of the complexity away from users. That convenience does not eliminate the infrastructure connecting different networks. Thursday’s exploit occurred precisely in that boundary layer.
The project’s reimbursement pledge limits the immediate user-loss problem. It does not answer the technical question.
The promised post-mortem is the real confirmation point. Token Recon will be looking for the exact vulnerable contract interaction, whether the flaw could have affected additional Omni routes, how the attacker obtained execution and whether the patched design removes the failure class rather than only the exploited path.
Sources
The Block, NEAR Intents halts services after $3.8 million exploit
