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