The project said the incident was caused by a bug in the way its Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract. The contract-side vulnerability has since been patched, and NEAR Intents said affected funds will be reimbursed in full
That was not necessary in the end: the exploiter returned all stolen assets one day later after the NEAR Intents team identified the attacker and established communication, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, said in a Friday X post
NEAR Intents is designed to make cross-chain trading simpler. Instead of asking users to choose a bridge, exchange or route themselves, they specify the swap they want and independent market makers, known as solvers, compete to complete it behind the scenes. The platform’s website said it has processed more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains
NEAR NEAR$5.6843, the native token of the blockchain closely associated with NEAR Intents, was down about 6% over the past 24 hours at the time of writing, though the disclosed vulnerability involved its cross-chain infrastructure rather than the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain
The incident adds to a rough year for crypto security. Just last week, exchange Bitget suffered an exploit that resulted in over $350 million in stolen assets. Other major incidents included Liquid Network at about $320 million, Drift at $295 million and Kelp at $293 million, according to DefiLlama data
NEAR Intents said it reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with security and blockchain analytics firms to trace the funds
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the exploit began with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents. He said the stolen funds were then sent to crypto exchange KuCoin and bridged into bitcoin BTC$83,525.14
The platform expected core services to resume quickly, but deposits and withdrawals on several networks were set to remain unavailable for longer while fixes were completed. Its status page showed issues affecting BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma
UPDATE (Oct. 2, 18:52 UTC): Adds detail about exploiter returning all stolen funds
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