NEAR Intents Promises Full Compensation After Vulnerability Attack
NEAR Intents confirmed on October 1 that it had been attacked and suspended services. Preliminary investigations indicate that the vulnerability was in the interaction between the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract, not in the NEAR underlying chain itself. The team stated that the contract side has been fixed, and core services are expected to resume in about 1 hour, with full compensation for losses.
Initial losses are estimated at approximately $3.8 million. On-chain records show that about 3.87 million USDT left a contract labeled as HOT Bridge treasury on the BNB Chain within approximately 6 hours. The attack initially tested with 10 and 11 USDT, then transferred amounts ranging from 35,000 to 1.5 million USDT in 5 transactions from Wednesday night to Thursday morning, with the receiving address triggering withdrawals itself.
After the security layer SHIELD detected anomalies, the team halted services and located and patched the contract vulnerability within 1 hour of detection. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin later stated that NEAR Intents and near.com have resumed. Users holding related chain assets do not need to transfer them themselves; they can first exchange them for other assets after core services are restored.
Deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks including BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll, and Plasma will need to be additionally paused for about 12 hours while waiting for the Omni infrastructure to be completed. The case has been reported, and security companies and on-chain analysts are tracking it; a post-incident report will be released in a few days.
On-chain tracker ZachXBT stated that the BSC hot wallet stopped processing transactions after multiple abnormal outflows. The stolen funds were transferred to KuCoin and then across to the Bitcoin network, totaling over $3.8 million. Another tracking group attributed 7 transactions totaling 3.865 million BSC-USD to the same receiving address, with one path entering the KuCoin deposit address in units of about 100 BNB, and another path entering a Bitcoin address with about 7.03 BTC. KuCoin has not publicly disclosed whether it has frozen these funds.
The seller is the attacker, while the buyer is the exchange hot wallet and cross-chain bridge. This is a forced liquidity event driven by the incident, not user redemptions. Funds moved from the protocol treasury to centralized exchanges and were then exchanged for Bitcoin, increasing tracking difficulty. The beneficiaries are the addresses that completed withdrawals first. The pressure is on NEAR Intents' compensation account, the liquidity of the 11 chains still frozen for deposits and withdrawals, and market makers treating the cross-chain intent protocol as a settlement layer.
The platform's cumulative processing volume exceeded $25 billion about a month and a half ago, with the official figure exceeding $30 billion, covering 35 chains. NEAR token fell about 6% in 24 hours, trading at $4.94. The team did not specify whether the losses would be charged to users or the protocol's inventory, only promising full compensation. The impact has since been narrowed down to USDT on BSC.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
NEAR was founded by Illia Polosukhin and Alex Skidanov, with the former having participated in the Transformer paper. Intents is a later-added cross-chain exchange layer that executes user intents through solvers and Omni deposits and withdrawals without altering the NEAR main chain consensus. This product is similar to the Wormhole and Nomad infrastructures from 2022: main chain security does not equate to bridge and hot wallet security. After Wormhole was hacked for about $320 million, Jump covered the losses, while Nomad's $190 million loss had almost no equivalent backing. NEAR Intents has written compensation into its protocol commitments, effectively using operational funds to cover the defects of the interaction layer.
The money path has already left the protocol. Approximately 3.87 million USDT flowed out from the HOT Bridge treasury address on the BNB Chain, through the KuCoin deposit address, and was then converted into about 7.03 BTC. The attacker chose the exchange instead of a mixer, opting for speed through a centralized deposit window. The protocol side can only halt deposits and withdrawals, fix contracts, report incidents, and provide post-incident compensation; it cannot unilaterally recover balances that have already entered exchanges. KuCoin has not publicly frozen the funds, turning recovery from on-chain confirmation into a judicial request.
A comparison can be made to the tightening of hot wallet permissions after the Ronin bridge hack in 2022 and the freezing of cross-chain funds due to the disappearance of Multichain executives in 2023. The current position is not one of expansion, but of control: cumulative processing volume has reached $25 billion to $30 billion, but a single Omni interaction defect can halt deposits and withdrawals across 11 chains. Just days ago, the same protocol was intercepting stolen funds from Bitget, indicating that it simultaneously serves as both a settlement layer and a risk control layer, with both functions sharing a single deposit and withdrawal contract.
Structurally, this represents a trust outsourcing in the reconstruction of the industry chain. Users believe they are using NEAR to exchange assets, but the actual risk falls on Omni deposits and withdrawals, BSC hot wallets, and exchange deposit addresses. The mechanism is that the intent protocol synthesizes multi-chain balances into a single order entry; any defect in one segment of the interaction can become a withdrawal point for the entire network. Compensation can protect users, but it cannot safeguard the path that has already been validated for withdrawal. Pricing power has temporarily shifted from the protocol to the party that withdraws first and crosses into Bitcoin.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The main chain not being compromised does not mean your money is still on the main chain.
Hot wallets are speed, but also withdrawal points.
The promised compensation is for the balance, but the path cannot be recovered.