NEAR Intents lost approximately $3.8 million in a Thursday security exploit, the cross-chain trading platform confirmed, after a bug in its Omni deposit and withdrawal system drained user funds across multiple blockchains.

The protocol team attributed the incident to a vulnerability in how the Omni system interacts with the NEAR Intents smart contract. It said engineers have patched the contract-side flaw and pledged to reimburse affected users in full.

What happened in the exploit?

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the exploit began with irregular withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents. According to ZachXBT, the stolen assets moved to crypto exchange KuCoin, where actors bridged them into bitcoin.

Thursday's pattern fits a growing playbook that pairs contract-level bugs with rapid laundering through centralized exchanges and bitcoin bridges. NEAR Intents has not publicly named a suspect, but the KuCoin deposit provides a transactional hook that compliance teams can pursue through standard KYC channels.

The platform reported the incident to law enforcement and engaged outside security and blockchain analytics firms to trace the funds, NEAR Intents said.

Which networks were affected?

Cross-chain operations have stalled across 11 networks while engineers apply fixes. NEAR Intents' status page listed affected chains including:

• BNB Smart Chain
• Polygon
• TON
• Optimism
• Avalanche
• Stellar
• Monad
• X Layer
• ADI
• Scroll
• Plasma

Core matching and solver services should resume shortly, the platform said, but deposits and withdrawals on those networks will stay offline longer while security reviews conclude.

What is NEAR Intents?

NEAR Intents runs a cross-chain trading system designed to abstract away the routing layer. Users specify the swap they want, and independent market makers known as solvers compete to fulfill the trade behind the scenes. The platform's website claims more than $30 billion in processed volume across 35 blockchains since launch.

The Omni system sits between users and solvers, handling deposits and withdrawals across heterogeneous chains. Risk concentrates at precisely the seam where Omni hands funds to the solvers' settlement logic, the same seam the vulnerability pierced. Future iterations of intent-based systems will likely require deeper pre-deployment fuzzing and slashing-style safeguards for solver hot wallets.

How does this fit the broader security picture?

The incident adds to a string of major crypto exploits tracked through 2025. DefiLlama data cited by industry analysts place recent losses at:

• Bitget: over $350 million (prior week)
• Liquid Network: approximately $320 million
• Drift: $295 million
• Kelp: $293 million

NEAR Intents' loss sits well below those totals. The diversity of victims — exchanges, bridges, intent-based protocols, and restaking platforms — shows attackers are probing many surfaces at once. Yet the pattern points to a sustained wave of protocol-level and exchange compromises draining liquidity across decentralized finance.

Investigators will continue tracing the KuCoin-bound transfers and bitcoin-bridged proceeds, a process that could set the practical precedent for recoveries in the latest round of cross-chain exploits.