NEAR Intents, a protocol used to swap cryptocurrencies across different blockchains, suffered an attack estimated at US$3.8 million on Thursday (1st) and had to temporarily suspend part of its services. The team said the vulnerability has already been fixed and promised to fully reimburse users for the funds lost.

According to the project, the incident was caused by a flaw in the interaction between the Omni infrastructure, responsible for deposits and withdrawals, and the NEAR Intents smart contract. The problem affected operations involving different networks and led the team to halt services while investigating the case.

After the fix, NEAR Intents said the main protocol and Near.com should return to operation quickly, but deposits and withdrawals on 11 blockchains would remain unavailable for around 12 hours. The affected networks included BNB Smart Chain, Polygon and Optimism.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT pointed to irregular movements in a hot wallet belonging to the protocol on BNB Smart Chain. According to him, part of the stolen funds was sent to the exchange KuCoin and later converted and transferred into Bitcoin. KuCoin had not commented on the case by the time of publication.

The NEAR Intents team also said it had contacted law enforcement authorities and blockchain analysis firms in an attempt to trace the funds. A report detailing the cause of the attack and the measures taken is expected to be published in the coming days.

Attack follows strong growth for NEAR Intents

The incident comes at a time of expansion for the protocol. NEAR Intents had surpassed US$25 billion in cumulative transaction volume about a month and a half ago, reflecting the growth of tools that aim to simplify operations across different blockchains.

Instead of requiring users to manually choose bridges, decentralised exchanges and routes between networks, "intents"-based systems let them specify the desired outcome — for example, swapping an asset on one blockchain for another asset on a different network — while specialised participants find a route to execute the operation.

This structure, however, also widens the risk surface. Cross-chain protocols need to interact with contracts, wallets and infrastructure across different networks, and vulnerabilities in any of these layers can open the door to attacks.

The incident also occurred just two days after the launch of the first spot NEAR ETF in the United States by Bitwise. The fund, traded under the ticker NRR and featuring built-in staking rewards, debuted on Monday (29th). Following the attack, the NEAR token fell around 6.7%, to US$4.96, while the ETF dropped roughly 6.4%.

Hacks remain one of the main risks in the crypto market

The US$3.8 million attack is relatively small compared with some of the year's biggest episodes, but it adds to a string of incidents that continues to weigh on the sector.

Data from CertiK shows the Web3 market lost more than US$1.31 billion across 344 incidents in the first half of 2026 alone. Excluding amounts later frozen or recovered, net losses stood at approximately US$1.2 billion.

The third quarter added a further US$1.26 billion in losses, up 53.9% from the US$819.4 million recorded in the previous three months. September was especially heavy, driven by major attacks such as those on Bitget and Liquid Network.

The type of flaw found in NEAR Intents also features among the sector's leading attack vectors. CertiK counted 204 incidents involving code vulnerabilities in the first half of the year alone, the category with the highest number of occurrences in that period. The firm also warned that hackers have been exploiting not only newly launched contracts but also old code that remains active without previously identified flaws.

In the case of NEAR Intents, the promise of reimbursement reduces the direct impact on users if fully honoured, but the episode underscores a recurring problem for protocols that connect different blockchains: the more networks and systems need to communicate with each other, the greater the number of points that need to be protected against failures and attacks.

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