NEAR Intents, a multichain transaction protocol, halted services on October 1 after a $3.8 million exploit hit its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure.
The protocol disclosed the incident at 2 p.m. GMT+1 and said services would resume within the hour once it had patched what it called a "contract-side vulnerability." Even after that fix, deposits and withdrawals across BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll, and Plasma were set to remain unavailable until the Omni infrastructure itself is patched.
In a post on X, the project said: "NEAR Intents has been (and continues to be) intensely battle-tested. The exploit was swiftly detected, contained and patched and trading has already resumed across most networks. Back to business as usual, grateful for all the messages of support. Accelerate."
ZachXBT says funds moved to KuCoin and then to Bitcoin
Crypto sleuth ZachXBT also documented the exploit. He said NEAR Intents’ BSC hot wallet saw irregular outflows before transactions stopped processing.
According to ZachXBT, "The funds were immediately transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin."
NEAR Protocol’s token, NEAR, dropped from $5.1 to $4.79 in the minutes after the disclosure.
The hack came days after NEAR Intents froze part of the stolen Bitget funds
Earlier this month, centralized crypto exchange Bitget was hacked for more than $380 million in an attack Protos said likely stemmed from North Korea.
NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko said $50 million worth of Bitget funds had attempted to move through the protocol. He said the protocol froze $503,000, while only $166,000 was able to pass through. The remainder, he said, "went to other providers."
THORChain took a different approach while the Bitget funds were being moved. Bitget’s CEO asked the protocol to refuse service to the parties moving the stolen assets, but THORChain declined, saying it is "decentralized and permissionless."
Protos also noted that THORChain paused its own services earlier this year after a $10 million hack.
Debate over decentralization
NEAR Intents’ freezing of Bitget-linked funds, followed by its service pause after this exploit, has triggered debate among crypto users over how decentralized the protocol really is.