NEAR Drops 10% After $3.8M NEAR Intents Exploit

Two days after Bitwise launched a NEAR exchange‑traded fund on Sept. 29, NEAR Intents reported an exploit that briefly paused Omni deposit and withdrawal services and coincided with a roughly 10% fall in NEAR to $4.86.

NEAR Intents, a payments and trading infrastructure that processes more than $4 billion a month, said it stopped services after detecting a bug in the interaction between its Omni layer and the Intents smart contract. Its SHIELD security system flagged unusual activity before the suspension.

The project reported a preliminary loss of about $3.8 million, said it patched the contract vulnerability and pledged to compensate affected users. Co‑founder Illia Polosukhin indicated the breach was limited to USDT on Binance Smart Chain and that the immediate vulnerability was fixed within an hour. Some deposit and withdrawal routes across BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar and Scroll remained offline while additional fixes were completed.

Blockchain tracing showed 3.87 million USDC moved through multiple wallets and ultimately reached accounts at KuCoin. NEAR Intents and near.com resumed services after the initial patch. The team reported the incident to law enforcement and hired blockchain analytics and security firms to follow the funds. A fuller postmortem is expected in the coming days.

The NEAR blockchain continued producing blocks and processing transactions during the incident. NEAR Protocol said the exploit did not involve a vulnerability in the network or the native NEAR token. Bitwise’s ETF holds the NEAR token itself rather than assets deposited through NEAR Intents.

Bitwise’s NEAR ETF began trading on NYSE Arca on Sept. 29 and recorded $35.5 million of net inflows in its first day. By Sept. 30 cumulative inflows exceeded $50 million and the fund held about $52.8 million in net assets, roughly 0.76% of NEAR’s market capitalization based on on‑chain analytics.

On derivatives markets, futures open interest denominated in NEAR peaked at about 215 million NEAR on Sept. 21 and fell to about 169 million NEAR by Sept. 29, a decline of roughly 21%. Dollar‑denominated derivative exposure reached about $1 billion on Sept. 27.

Polosukhin warned that attackers are using more advanced methods and automation, including AI, and urged stronger on‑chain contract verification and improved off‑chain monitoring: “The crypto space is entering a new era of far more sophisticated cyber attacks. As a space, we need to be far more vigilant and raise the bar on both onchain contract standards and offchain monitoring and proactive prevention.”

NEAR Intents has said it will compensate affected users and publish a detailed report on the breach and remediation steps.