NEAR Intents Restores Service After $3.8 Million BSC Exploit

The attacker targeted a specific vulnerability within the interaction between Omni’s deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract. While the platform and its near.com interface have returned to service, Polosukhin noted that some specific chains remain restricted as the team conducts a postmortem. He emphasized that the incident was isolated to the Intents layer, leaving the core NEAR Protocol, its native NEAR token, and other ecosystem applications entirely unaffected.

Operating at a scale that processes over $4 billion in monthly trading and payment volume, the platform is now shifting toward more rigorous security standards. Polosukhin stated that the findings from this breach will be integrated into the ongoing development of a formal verification system for NEAR contracts. This defensive pivot follows recent efforts by the team to harden their infrastructure, including a late September intervention where SHIELD blocked over $50 million in suspicious transfers linked to the Bitget exchange hack.

This security incident occurs just days after the launch of the Bitwise NEAR ETF on NYSE Arca, a product that provides institutional-grade exposure to the NEAR ecosystem. Despite the disruption to Intents, the platform continues to support its recent integrations, including a partnership with Ondo Finance that allows users to access tokenized U.S. equities. Looking ahead, the NEAR team intends to share incident data with security partners to better counter the rising trend of AI-assisted infrastructure probing.