NEAR Intents Loses $3.8M to a Bug in Its Omni Deposit Layer

NEAR Intents lost $3.8 million on Thursday to a bug in the layer that handles its deposits and withdrawals. The service routes swap orders across dozens of blockchains, and it paused cross-chain deposits and withdrawals while the fault was patched. Seven accounts read here give the same loss figure, and none disputes it. The team said affected users will be made whole and that it had reported the incident to law enforcement. How many networks went dark is the part nobody agrees on.

Where the fault sat

The bug was in the interaction between Omni, the deposit and withdrawal infrastructure, and the NEAR Intents smart contract. Decrypt, Protos, Bitcoin.com News and crypto.news all describe it in those terms. Protos calls it a contract-side vulnerability and says it was patched quickly. One account goes further than the others on what was taken: crypto.news alone says the drained asset was USDT on BNB Chain, and alone names SHIELD, an automated monitoring system, as what caught the anomaly and triggered the pause. Both details stand on a single outlet. The NEAR blockchain itself and its token were not touched by the fault, which crypto.news states and nothing read here contradicts.

Eleven networks, or seven

Bitcoin.com News, publishing at 9:47 a.m. Eastern, counted eleven paused networks and listed them: BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma. Decrypt also says eleven, naming three of them. CryptoSlate counted seven, with Monad, LayerX, Adi and Plasma absent from an otherwise identical list. They do not reconcile. Core services were patched and expected back inside an hour, with some chains needing roughly twelve. The Block's Thursday morning headline said services had halted; crypto.news, about seven hours later, said they had resumed with some connections still restricted. We could not establish how many were live again by Friday morning.

The Bitget money, counted two ways

Two days before the exploit, NEAR Intents turned away proceeds from the Bitget theft, a loss the exchange itself eventually put at $387.5 million. The accounts of that episode do not line up. Decrypt describes a $50 million swap attempt being blocked. Protos and Cryptopolitan describe roughly $50 million of stolen Bitget funds moving through the service, of which $503,000 was frozen and about $166,000 got through. Those are not the same event, and neither reading corrects the other. Cryptopolitan alone quotes general manager Alex Shevchenko arguing that crypto infrastructure cannot demand recognition of digital property rights while staying optimized to help launder stolen funds. Handling the same money, THORChain had declined to block the attacker's addresses at all.

What the promised report has to answer

"All of the affected users will be compensated in full," said Illia Polosukhin, a NEAR co-founder.

Where the money went is reported by one outlet. Bitcoin.com News carries a line from the on-chain analyst ZachXBT that the funds were moved to KuCoin and bridged to Bitcoin; Decrypt names both him and the exchange without that sentence. The token's reaction is reported four ways. Decrypt puts the fall at between 6.7% and 8.93%, to somewhere between $4.86 and $4.96. Protos has it going from $5.10 to $4.79, about 6%. Cryptopolitan says 6% to 7%; CryptoSlate says 10%. No account states the window its percentage covers, so the four cannot be set against each other.

The timing was poor for NEAR in another way. Bitwise listed a NEAR exchange-traded fund on NYSE Arca on 29 September, two days before the bug was used, and CryptoSlate alone puts the fund's first-day inflow at $35.5 million. NEAR Intents has handled more than $30 billion in swaps across 35 blockchains since it launched, above $4 billion of that in the past month, which makes Thursday's loss small against the flow it carries. A detailed incident report was promised within days, and crypto.news alone says Polosukhin also committed to formal verification for NEAR contracts. Until that report is out, the open questions are the ones the accounts split on: how many networks were affected, and whether the $50 million figure from September describes money blocked or money that passed.