NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin: Intents Have Been Restored
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin stated on October 1 that NEAR Intents and near.com have been restored. A few affected network connections remain limited, and deposits and withdrawals have not been fully reopened.
He confirmed a loss of approximately $3.8 million. The attack exploited a vulnerability in the interaction between the Omni deposit/withdrawal infrastructure and NEAR Intents smart contracts. The security layer SHIELD first detected abnormal behavior, leading to a temporary suspension of services. The team located the vulnerability and completed contract-side repairs within one hour of detection.
The impact has been narrowed down to USDT on the BNB Chain. On-chain records show that approximately 3.87 million USDT left the contract labeled HOT Bridge treasury within about 6 hours. Initially, 10 and 11 USDT were tested, followed by five transactions ranging from 35,000 to 1.5 million USDT. The receiving address triggered the withdrawals autonomously. The underlying NEAR protocol is not within the scope of the vulnerability, and the disclosed losses do not involve main chain consensus.
Affected users will receive full compensation. Polosukhin did not specify whether the compensation would come from protocol reserves, treasury, or insurance, only confirming that affected users would be reimbursed. Users holding relevant chain assets do not need to move their assets; they can first exchange them for other assets after core services are restored. Deposits and withdrawals for 11 networks, including BSC, Polygon, and TON, remain suspended for approximately 12 hours for repairs.
The path of the stolen funds has been tracked separately. ZachXBT reported that funds were transferred from the BSC hot wallet to KuCoin, then crossed into the Bitcoin network. Another tracking group attributed seven transactions totaling approximately 3.865 million BSC-USD to the same receiving address, with one path entering the exchange deposit address in units of about 100 BNB, and another path involving about 7.03 BTC entering a Bitcoin address. KuCoin has not publicly disclosed whether it has frozen the funds. The case has been reported to the authorities.
The seller is the attack address that has completed withdrawals, while the buyer is the exchange hot wallet and cross-chain bridge. This is an event-driven balance migration, not a user redemption. The restoration of services has reopened exchanges, but the deposit and withdrawal restrictions have blocked new funds from the 11 chains. Beneficiaries are existing users who can exchange for other assets, as well as holders who do not need to exit at a discount immediately after the promise of compensation. The channels still under suspension for deposits and withdrawals, as well as exchanges that have not publicly frozen related deposits, are under pressure.
The platform's cumulative processing volume has previously exceeded $25 billion, with the official figure over $30 billion, covering 35 chains. The NEAR token dropped about 6% to $4.94 within 24 hours after the incident was disclosed. The price fluctuation is due to cross-chain infrastructure issues, not a breach of the main chain.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Polosukhin, coming from Google, participated in the Transformer paper and left the industry with Alex Skidanov around 2017 to work on NEAR, which launched its mainnet in 2020. Intents is a later added cross-chain exchange layer that delegates user intentions to solvers and Omni for execution. After the $320 million Wormhole hack in 2022, Jump covered it the same day, while Nomad's $190 million lacked equivalent backing. This time, he announced the fix within an hour of discovery and personally communicated the restoration, relying on founder credibility rather than an audit report.
The money is no longer in a contract that can be rolled back unilaterally. About 3.87 million USDT left HOT Bridge's treasury on the BNB Chain, entering the KuCoin recharge path, then converting to about 7.03 BTC. What the protocol can mobilize includes suspending deposits and withdrawals, repairing interaction contracts, reporting the incident, and post-event compensation, but it cannot retrieve balances that have already entered exchanges. Full compensation is therefore a balance sheet action: replacing the USDT that has left with other assets from the protocol or associated treasury. 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 before the withdrawal restoration of the Ronin bridge in 2022, and the long-term freezing of cross-chain funds after the Multichain suspension in 2023. The current position is a control phase. The cumulative processing volume has reached between $25 billion and $30 billion, and a single Omni interaction flaw can still halt deposits and withdrawals across 11 chains. A few days ago, the same protocol was intercepting funds stolen from Bitget, indicating it performs both settlement and risk control, with two functions sharing a set of deposit and withdrawal contracts. The main chain was unaffected, confining the incident to the product layer rather than the consensus layer.
Structurally, this is a responsibility reversal after trust outsourcing. Users believe they are using NEAR to exchange assets, but the risk actually falls on Omni deposits and withdrawals, BSC hot wallets, and exchange deposit addresses. The mechanism is that the intention protocol synthesizes multi-chain balances into a single entry point, and any interaction flaw can become a withdrawal outlet. The restoration of services preserved the trading entry but did not recover funds that have already crossed into Bitcoin. Pricing power temporarily remains with the party that withdrew first, while the protocol uses the promise of compensation to recover user-side losses.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- Service restoration does not mean the money has returned.
- The main chain is secure, but it cannot prevent withdrawals at the product layer.
- Full compensation is a matter of credit; freezing deposits is recovery.