NEAR Intents Reports $3.8 Million Loss Due to Smart Contract Bug

NEAR Intents, a multichain execution and settlement protocol, has reported a significant security incident resulting in approximately $3.8 million in losses. The issue arose from a bug in the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contract, as stated by the team on October 1.

Following the detection of the security breach, NEAR Intents paused its services. The preliminary findings indicate that the exploit targeted the service's hot wallet on the BNB Chain, leading to unusual outflows before transactions were halted. The stolen funds were reportedly moved to the crypto exchange KuCoin and converted into Bitcoin.

Despite the incident, NEAR Intents assured users that they would not lose access to their assets held in the affected networks. Once operations resume, users will be able to swap their assets into other supported tokens. The NEAR Intents team has patched the vulnerability and is working with law enforcement and blockchain analytics partners to recover the stolen funds.

Deposits and withdrawals across multiple networks, including BNB Chain, Polygon, and Avalanche, will remain unavailable for approximately 12 hours while fixes are implemented. NEAR Intents plans to release a detailed incident report in the coming days.