NEAR Intents said on October 1 that it stopped its cross-chain swap services after detecting a security incident, which it traced to a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The project’s preliminary report estimates a total loss of roughly $3.8 million, and it said affected users will be reimbursed in full.
NEAR Intents is an intent-based trading layer that lets users express a desired swap and have independent market makers, known as solvers, complete it across chains. The platform says it has processed more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains, which made the pause disruptive for a service positioned as a simpler alternative to manually bridging assets.
The bug and the pause
The vulnerability sat in the interaction between the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the smart contract, rather than in the NEAR Protocol blockchain itself. The contract-side flaw has been patched, but deposits and withdrawals remained unavailable on several networks while fixes were completed. A status page listed issues affecting BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma.
Response and reimbursement
NEAR Intents said it reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with security and blockchain analytics firms to trace the funds, while committing to reimburse affected users in full. The disclosure follows a difficult stretch for the sector: last week, exchange Bitget suffered an exploit that led to more than $350 million in stolen assets, one of several major losses in a year already scarred by hacks.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the exploit began with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents. He said the stolen funds were then sent to crypto exchange KuCoin and bridged into bitcoin. NEAR, the native token of the blockchain closely associated with NEAR Intents, was down about 6% over the prior 24 hours at the time of writing, though the disclosure involved cross-chain infrastructure rather than the underlying protocol.
What comes next
The platform expected core services to resume quickly, while deposits and withdrawals on the affected networks were set to stay offline longer as the team completed its review. The incident shows that the intent-solver layer, which has become central to cross-chain transactions for protocols like NEAR Intents, carries its own security surface separate from the blockchains it connects.
