NEAR Intents halts services after $3.8 million Omni exploit

NEAR Intents halted its services after an exploit of its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure stole $3.8 million. The multichain transaction protocol disclosed the incident today at 2pm GMT+1. NEAR Intents said it expected services to resume within an hour after it patched a contract-side vulnerability. However, NEAR Intents said deposits and withdrawals on BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma would remain unavailable until Omni infrastructure was patched. Crypto investigator ZachXBT said the protocol's BSC hot wallet had irregular outflows before transactions stopped processing. ZachXBT said the funds were immediately transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin. The price of NEAR Protocol's NEAR token fell from $5.1 to $4.79 in the minutes after the disclosure. Earlier this month, Bitget was hacked for more than $380 million in an attack likely linked to North Korea. NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko said $50 million worth of funds stolen from Bitget tried to pass through the protocol. Shevchenko said NEAR Intents froze $503,000 and only $166,000 passed through it. Shevchenko said the rest went to other providers. Bitget's CEO asked THORChain to refuse service to people moving the stolen funds. THORChain refused, saying it is decentralized and permissionless. THORChain had paused its services earlier this year when it was hacked for $10 million. The freezing of Bitget funds and the current service halt have prompted crypto users to question how decentralized NEAR Intents is.