NEAR Intents hacked for $3.8M after blocking $50M linked to Bitget

NEAR Intents suffered 1^er October hack estimated at $3.8 million, caused by a bug between its smart contract and deposit and withdrawal infrastructure. The protocol promises to fully reimburse users and now claims to have identified the perpetrator of the attack, to whom it is giving 48 hours to return the funds.

The NEAR Intents hack in four points

NEAR Intents detected a flaw in the interaction between its smart contract and Omni, its infrastructure responsible for managing certain deposits and withdrawals. The incident resulted in the loss of $3.8 million belonging to users.

The protocol suspended its services during its initial investigations. He claims to have corrected the vulnerability on the contract side to prevent it from being exploited again.

Here are the main elements communicated since the incident:

• The provisional loss reached $3.8 million;
• NEAR Intents promises to fully refund affected users;
• The flaw in the contract has been corrected, according to the protocol;
• The authorities and several blockchain analysis companies have been contacted;
• A detailed report is due to be published in the coming days;
• The protocol claims to have identified the author, without revealing his identity.

“We have identified who you are, sir.”has declared Alex Shevchenko, Managing Director of NEAR Intents. He gave the alleged perpetrator 48 hours to return the assets as part of responsible disclosure. “After 48 hours this possibility will disappear”he warned.

This statement comes directly from NEAR Intents. It does not yet constitute an attribution confirmed by a judicial authority.

How was the NEAR Intents hack possible?

NEAR Intents is a cross-chain protocol that allows assets to be exchanged between multiple blockchains. Instead of manually executing each step, the user expresses the desired result, for example converting a token present on Solana into bitcoins. Specialized actors then seek the best path to achieve this intention.

This model simplifies operations, but increases interactions between contracts, networks and external infrastructures. In this case, NEAR Intents attributes the incident to a bug in the communication between Omni and its smart contract. The fault therefore did not necessarily come from an isolated error in each component, but from their joint operation.

The protocol has not yet explained precisely how the hacker triggered the withdrawals or published the announced technical audit. It also remains to be verified whether the deployed correction covers all possible variants of the attack.

The funds would have passed through KuCoin before Bitcoin

According to blockchain investigator ZachXBT, the stolen assets were transferred to the KuCoin platform and then converted or moved to the Bitcoin network. This passage complicates their monitoring, because investigators must link operations carried out on several blockchains.

NEAR Intents claims to work with specialists in on-chain analysis to trace the funds and attempt to recover them. Alex Shevchenko also published three addresses allowing restitution in bitcoin, BNB or solana.

No actual reimbursement has yet been publicly confirmed. At this stage, full coverage of losses therefore remains a commitment of the protocol, and not an operation already completed.

NEAR Intents hack follows Bitget hack

The incident comes days after the Bitget hack, which caused around $387.5 million in losses. Before being attacked itself, NEAR Intents claimed to have blocked more than $50 million in transfers associated with the Bitget hacker’s addresses.

Its SHIELD system would have detected these operations and frozen $503,000 while they were being carried out. Around $166,000 in suspicious funds nevertheless passed through the protocol. NEAR Intents then announced that it would waive the bounty offered by Bitget so that a larger sum could be returned.

This connection does not prove any link between the two attacks. In particular, there is nothing to attribute the hacking of NEAR Intents to the group suspected of having targeted Bitget.

The third quarter, however, was particularly heavy for the sector. CertiK estimates security incident losses at $1.26 billion across 247 events, up from $819.4 million in the previous quarter. The month of September alone concentrates approximately $769 million in losses. The publication of the technical report and the expiration of the 48-hour ultimatum will now make it possible to assess the chances of recovering the $3.8 million.