Multichain transaction protocol NEAR Intents lost $3.8 million in an exploit of its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure, forcing a full halt of services on October 1.

The protocol disclosed the security incident at 2pm GMT+1 on X and said services would resume within the hour after it patched what it called a "contract-side vulnerability." Trading restarted across most networks, but cross-chain deposits and withdrawals stayed offline pending a full patch of the Omni layer.

NEAR Intents co-founder Chronear framed the incident as contained: "NEAR Intents has been (and continues to be) intensely battle-tested. The exploit was swiftly detected, contained and patched and trading has already resumed across most networks."

Which networks remain affected?

Deposits and withdrawals are unavailable across a wide footprint of chains while the Omni infrastructure is repaired:

• BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche
• Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll, Plasma

That breadth matters operationally. NEAR Intents positions itself as a routing layer for cross-chain swaps, and an Omni-layer vulnerability implicates the deposit-and-withdrawal path on every integrated network simultaneously, not a single-chain issue.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT documented the exploit and reported that the protocol's BSC hot wallet showed irregular outflows before transactions stopped processing. "The funds were immediately transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin," he said.

The NEAR token fell from $5.10 to $4.79 within minutes of the disclosure, according to CoinGecko data.

What is the Bitget connection?

The hack lands weeks after NEAR Intents positioned itself as a gatekeeper against laundering stolen exchange funds.

Earlier in September, centralized exchange Bitget was hacked for over $380 million in an attack widely attributed to North Korean actors. NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko disclosed that roughly $50 million of the stolen Bitget funds attempted to move through the protocol.

Shevchenko said the protocol froze $503,000 of that flow, while only $166,000 passed through. The remainder, he said, "went to other providers."

The episode contrasted sharply with THORChain, which refused Bitget's request to block the hacked funds. THORChain argued it is "decentralized and permissionless" — despite having paused its own services earlier in the year after a $10 million hack.

Does this reopen the decentralization debate?

The sequence has revived scrutiny of NEAR Intents' architecture. The same operational control that let the protocol freeze Bitget-linked funds also let it halt all services within minutes of detecting its own exploit.

For users, that trade-off is now visible on both sides: intervention capability that intercepts criminal flows, and a single point of failure in the Omni layer that took eleven networks offline at once. Crypto community members are openly questioning how decentralized the protocol actually is.

For now, trading has resumed on most networks, but the recovery timeline for full deposit and withdrawal functionality across all eleven chains depends entirely on the completion of the Omni infrastructure patch.