NEAR Intents pauses cross-chain services after $3.8 million exploit

NEAR Intents suffered a security exploit Thursday that caused about $3.8 million in losses. The platform paused services and temporarily disabled deposits and withdrawals on several blockchains. NEAR Intents said a bug in the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal system and the NEAR Intents smart contract caused the incident. NEAR Intents said it had patched the contract-side vulnerability and would reimburse affected funds in full. NEAR Intents reported the incident to law enforcement and enlisted security firms to trace the funds. An investigator said the funds were sent to KuCoin and converted into bitcoin. NEAR Intents lets users specify a cross-chain swap for independent market makers, known as solvers, to complete. The platform's website says it has processed more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains. NEAR, the native token of the blockchain closely associated with NEAR Intents, was down about 6% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing. The disclosed vulnerability involved cross-chain infrastructure rather than the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain.