Key points

  • NEAR Intents said a bug in the interaction between Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contract enabled the exploit.
  • The team restored NEAR Intents and near.com after patching the flaw, although several affected network connections initially remained unavailable.
  • Affected users were promised full compensation, but the team had not published a reimbursement timetable or complete postmortem.

NEAR Intents restored its main cross-chain service after an exploit caused an estimated $3.8 million loss, while promising to compensate affected users in full. The incident on October 1 involved USDT on BNB Smart Chain and temporarily disrupted a system used to route swaps and payments across multiple blockchain networks.

A contract interaction became the weak point

In an official statement, the NEAR Intents team said the breach resulted from a bug in the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the service's SHIELD monitoring system detected unusual behavior, prompting the team to pause Intents while engineers investigated.

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Polosukhin said the affected asset and network were USDT on BNB Smart Chain. He also said engineers found and fixed the exact vulnerability within an hour of detection. NEAR Intents and near.com later returned online, although several affected chain connections remained restricted during the staged recovery.

The Block reported that deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks faced a longer interruption, including routes involving BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and Optimism. The interruption therefore reached beyond the initial loss: users could not move assets through some supported paths while the team checked and reopened connections.

Compensation is promised, but details remain open

Both the project team and Polosukhin said affected users would be made whole. That commitment reduces uncertainty about who is expected to absorb the direct loss, but important operational details were not yet public. The team had not announced when claims would be processed, how eligibility would be verified or whether any stolen funds had been recovered.

NEAR Intents said it had contacted law enforcement and was working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds. It also promised a detailed public report in the following days. Until that postmortem is released, the precise transaction sequence, controls that failed and any changes beyond the immediate patch remain incomplete.

The underlying NEAR network was not the target

Polosukhin drew a distinction between the affected cross-chain infrastructure and the base network. According to his account, the core NEAR Protocol, the NEAR token and other applications running on the network were unaffected. That distinction matters because NEAR Intents is an application-layer service that coordinates swaps through independent solvers rather than the consensus layer that secures the blockchain itself.

For users, the practical risk was concentrated in the service's deposit, withdrawal and routing mechanisms. Even after the main interface reopened, anyone using previously restricted routes still needed to confirm that a specific chain was available before initiating a transaction. A restored website or swap interface does not by itself prove that every network path has returned to normal.

The incident is also a test of NEAR Intents' response systems. Rapid detection and a contract patch limited the time the flaw remained active, but compensation execution and a transparent postmortem will determine whether the recovery is complete. Users and infrastructure partners will be watching for a final accounting of the loss, the cause and the safeguards introduced before all routes are reopened.

Sources

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