NEAR Intents loses about $3.8 million in cross-chain swap exploit

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service built on NEAR Protocol, lost about $3.8 million to an exploit on Thursday. NEAR Intents lets users request swaps between blockchains, with outside market makers competing to fill the trades. The team said a flaw in the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal system and the NEAR Intents smart contract caused the loss. On-chain investigator ZachXBT said the service's BNB Chain hot wallet had several unusual outflows before it stopped processing transactions. ZachXBT said the stolen funds went to KuCoin and were converted into Bitcoin. NEAR Intents said it patched the contract flaw, will compensate affected users in full and reported the incident to law enforcement. Deposits and withdrawals remain paused for about 12 more hours on 11 networks: BNB Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma. The team said users holding assets from the paused networks inside NEAR Intents can swap them into other tokens once core service resumes. Neither the team's statement nor ZachXBT's alert reported any loss from the NEAR blockchain itself. The NEAR token fell 8.6% within hours of the exploit. Bitwise opened the first US spot NEAR exchange-traded fund two days before the exploit. Bitwise promoted NEAR Intents as part of the fund's appeal and said the service had processed over $32 billion in swaps. NEAR traded at $4.92 at press time, with a market value near $6.4 billion. The token had risen about 175% in September ahead of the Bitwise fund's launch. This was the second major exploit in the NEAR ecosystem this year, after Rhea Finance lost $7.6 million in April. NEAR Intents promised a full technical report in the coming days.