Overview
- NEAR Intents disclosed on Oct. 1 that a bug in its Omni deposit/withdrawal interaction with an Intents smart contract allowed an attacker to take about $3.8 million, mostly USDT on BNB Smart Chain.
- The team’s SHIELD monitoring flagged irregular activity, the contract vulnerability was patched within about an hour, core services and near.com were restored, and some deposit and withdrawal routes stayed restricted while Omni fixes finished.
- On‑chain investigators traced the stolen funds to KuCoin and reported the assets were converted and bridged into bitcoin, and NEAR Intents has reported the incident to law enforcement and hired outside security and analytics firms.
- NEAR Intents pledged full reimbursement to affected users, posted addresses for returning funds and its general manager set a 48‑hour demand for the attacker to return the money while recovery efforts continue.
- The exploit forced a multi‑percent drop in NEAR’s price and created an early stress test for the newly launched Bitwise NEAR ETF, prompting promises of a postmortem and accelerated formal verification and monitoring plans for NEAR smart contracts.