Cross-chain protocol NEAR Intents lost $3.8 million in user funds to an exploit on Thursday, pausing services while it patched the flaw. NEAR Protocol's token fell 8% in the hours after, and the breach came two days after NEAR Intents helped block funds tied to the Bitget hack.
Cross-chain protocol NEAR Intents reported a security breach that drained $3.8 million in user funds on Thursday. NEAR Protocol's native token fell 8% to $4.91 over the following 24 hours. The drop snapped a rally that had pushed the token up 148% over the preceding 30 days.
A bug in the deposit and withdrawal layer
NEAR Intents said a bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacting with its smart contract caused the breach. The platform said the "contract-side vulnerability has been patched" to prevent similar attacks, and pledged to compensate affected users in full.
Deposits and withdrawals on eleven networks were expected to stay suspended for roughly twelve more hours while the Omni fixes were completed, with core services projected to resume within about an hour. On-chain investigator ZachXBT said the stolen funds were transferred to the KuCoin exchange and bridged to Bitcoin, though it remained unclear who was behind the attack at the time of publication. NEAR Intents said it had reported the incident to law enforcement and was working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds.
A breach that followed the Bitget blocklist
The exploit came two days after NEAR Intents blocked $50 million in swaps tied to the hacker behind Bitget's $388 million breach, freezing more than $500,000 in funds. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen has speculated that North Korean hackers may have been responsible for last week's attack on the exchange.
Sources: Cointelegraph.com News, Decrypt, CoinGape
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