Cross-chain trading platform NEAR Intents experienced a security breach on Thursday resulting in approximately $3.8 million in losses, compelling the network to suspend operations and temporarily disable deposits and withdrawals across multiple blockchains.
The project explained that the attack stemmed from a flaw in how its Omni funding and withdrawal architecture interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The vulnerability on the contract side has now been fixed, and NEAR Intents has promised complete reimbursement for all impacted assets.
NEAR Intents aims to streamline cross-chain transactions. Instead of requiring users to manually select a bridge, exchange, or routing path, they simply declare their desired trade, and autonomous market makers known as solvers compete behind the scenes to execute it. According to its official website, the platform has handled over $30 billion in cumulative volume spanning 35 different blockchains.
NEAR NEAR$5.2236, the native cryptocurrency of the network closely tied to NEAR Intents, dropped roughly 6% over the preceding 24 hours at the time of publication, even though the disclosed security flaw affected its cross-chain framework rather than the base NEAR Protocol blockchain itself.
This event adds to an exceptionally difficult year for digital asset security. Only last week, trading platform Bitget encountered an exploit totaling over $350 million in stolen funds. Additional prominent breaches featured the Liquid Network at approximately $320 million, Drift at $295 million, and Kelp at $293 million, based on DefiLlama statistics.
NEAR Intents stated that it notified law enforcement authorities and is collaborating with blockchain intelligence and cybersecurity firms to track the stolen assets.
On-chain analyst ZachXBT noted that the hack commenced via unauthorized withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet associated with NEAR Intents. He reported that the illicitly acquired funds were subsequently transferred to the KuCoin digital asset exchange and swapped into bitcoin BTC$84,806.21.
While primary services were anticipated to recover rapidly, inbound and outbound transfers across several networks were expected to stay offline longer while remediation efforts finished. Its operational status page indicated disruptions impacting BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll, and Plasma.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/10/01/near-intents-hit-by-usd3-8-million-exploit-as-crypto-s-rough-year-of-hacks-continues.
