NEAR Intents Halts Service After $3.8M Exploit

NEAR Intents suspended its services Thursday after an attacker exploited a bug in the platform’s Omni deposit and withdrawal system, resulting in the loss of roughly $3.8 million in crypto.

The team said the vulnerability involved the way the Omni infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract, which manages funds and executes transactions automatically.

“Earlier today NEAR Intents services were stopped after a security incident was detected,” the team said in a post on X. It added that the incident had been reported to law enforcement and that it was working with security firms and blockchain analytics companies to track the stolen assets and attempt to recover them.

The exploit came only two days after NEAR Intents prevented a $50 million swap linked to the hacker behind the recent Bitget attack. That attacker stole about $387.5 million from the crypto exchange last week. There is currently no confirmation that the two incidents are connected.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen and blockchain analytics firm Elliptic previously said the Bitget attack showed characteristics associated with North Korean hacking groups. Those claims have not been independently confirmed.

The NEAR Intents incident also comes shortly after the platform gained attention from institutional investors. Bitwise launched its NEAR ETF two days before the exploit, giving traditional brokerage investors exposure to NEAR without requiring them to hold the cryptocurrency directly.

NEAR fell 8.93% to $4.86 following the incident, while shares of the Bitwise fund declined by more than 7%. When Bitwise first filed for the ETF in April 2025, NEAR was trading around $2.61.

NEAR Intents said the vulnerability affecting the smart contract has been fixed and that core services were expected to return within roughly an hour. However, deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks, including BNB Chain, Polygon and Optimism, were expected to remain suspended for around another 12 hours while additional Omni-related fixes were completed.

The platform also said users whose funds were affected would be fully compensated.

NEAR Intents operates as a cross-chain trading system where users submit swap requests and market makers compete to execute them. The service has processed more than $30 billion in transactions across 35 blockchains.

Cross-chain infrastructure has remained a major security concern across the crypto industry because assets often have to pass through contracts or liquidity pools connecting separate networks. Large pools of funds can become attractive targets for attackers, as seen in the 2022 Harmony bridge exploit, which resulted in roughly $100 million in losses.

NEAR Intents has not disclosed which users or assets were affected by the latest attack. The company's pledge to cover the losses is therefore particularly significant, as crypto assets generally do not have the same deposit insurance protections available to traditional bank accounts.