NEAR Intents halts services after reported $3.8 million exploit, pledges compensation

NEAR Intents, a protocol for swapping crypto across blockchains, halted services Thursday after an exploit caused approximately $3.8 million in losses, according to early reports. The team said a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract caused the incident. The team pledged to fully compensate the lost funds. The contract vulnerability has been patched. The team said NEAR Intents and Near.com were expected to resume operations within an hour. However, deposits and withdrawals on 11 blockchain networks, including BSC, Polygon and Optimism, were expected to remain unavailable for roughly another 12 hours. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the protocol's BSC hot wallet showed irregular outflows. ZachXBT said the stolen funds were transferred to the KuCoin exchange and bridged to bitcoin. KuCoin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NEAR Intents said it was already working with law enforcement and blockchain analytics platforms to trace the funds. NEAR Intents said it would release a post-mortem report in the coming days. Roughly a month and a half earlier, NEAR reported that lifetime volume moved through the platform had crossed $25 billion. The NEAR Protocol token was down 6.7% on the day, trading at $4.96. Bitwise's NEAR ETF, which launched two days earlier, was down 6.4% at the time of publication, losing more than its gains from Wednesday.