NEAR Intents hit by a $3.8M exploit days after turning away $50M from Bitget attackers

NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap protocol built on NEAR, lost about $3.8 million to a security exploit on Thursday and has paused its services. 

The platform had spent the prior week publicly blocking up to $50 million in stolen Bitget funds. The NEAR Intents team said it has patched the flaw, will reimburse users in full, and has referred the case to law enforcement.

How was NEAR Intents compromised?

NEAR Intents has attributed a loss of about $3.8 million to a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. 

The team posted on X that the attackers used that defect to drain a hot wallet before the contract-side vulnerability was closed.

NEAR Intents said core services and Near.com were expected back within roughly an hour of the disclosure, but deposits and withdrawals remain frozen on 11 networks, namely BSC, Polygon, Optimism, TON, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll, and Plasma. 

Deposits and withdrawals are set to remain down for about another 12 hours while fixes are finished. A post-mortem is promised in the coming days.

The NEAR Intent platform allows users to specify the outcome they want instead of choosing a bridge or route, and independent market makers known as solvers handle filling the order across chains. The project’s website reportedly puts its volume at over $30 billion across 35 blockchains. 

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT wrote on Telegram that he tracked the theft to suspicious transactions from a BNB Chain hot wallet that is linked to NEAR Intents. He said that the funds were routed to the KuCoin exchange and bridged into Bitcoin.  

Notably, earlier attacks that have been linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group were also routed through KuCoin and bridged into Bitcoin, but the NEAR Intents exploit has not officially been linked to any state actor so far. 

How much did NEAR Intents help Bitget recover?

Barely a week before this attack, NEAR Intents was the protocol holding the line after the September 24 Bitget breach, which cost the exchange $387.5 million. 

Cryptopolitan reported that the NEAR Intents’ general manager, Alex Shevchenko, said the attackers tried to send more than $50 million of the stolen money through the protocol, but its SHIELD risk-intelligence system froze about $503,000 of it, letting roughly $166,000 slip past. 

The team said it will not charge Bitget the standard 5% freeze and 5% recovery bounties, so more money can return to the exchange.

Shevchenko also stated that the crypto industry “cannot demand recognition of digital property rights” while they build infrastructure that is “optimized to help launder stolen funds.”

Notably, crypto security incidents in the third quarter alone have added up to $1.26 billion in losses across 247 events, up 53.9% from the prior quarter. The Bitget hack alone makes up about 31% of the total. 

The NEAR token fell roughly 6% to 7% on the day, trading near $4.95. Bitwise’s spot NEAR ETF (NRR), launched only two days earlier, was down 6.4% and had given back its opening gains.