NEAR Intents hit by $3.8M exploit days after Bitget fund freeze

Multichain transaction protocol NEAR Intents suspended operations on Tuesday after a $3.8 million hack exploited its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure.

The team announced the security breach at 2pm GMT+1, stating that services would resume within an hour once they had fixed the “contract-side vulnerability.”

However, the protocol added that deposits and withdrawals on networks including BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll, and Plasma would stay offline until the Omni infrastructure is patched.

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.

Back to business as usual, grateful for all the messages of support.

Accelerate.

— chronear (@chronear) October 1, 2026

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT detailed the exploit, noting that NEAR Intents’ BSC hot wallet showed unusual outflows before processing stopped. “The funds were immediately transferred to Kucoin and bridged to Bitcoin,” he stated.

NEAR Protocol’s token NEAR dropped from $5.1 to $4.79 in the minutes after the disclosure.

NEAR Intents helped freeze stolen Bitget funds

Earlier this month, centralized exchange Bitget was hit by a hack of over $380 million, likely linked to North Korea.

Alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, disclosed that $50 million in Bitget funds tried to pass through the protocol. Shevchenko said it froze $503,000, with only $166,000 getting through. The rest “went to other providers.”

Other protocols such as THORChain adopted a more hands-off stance while Bitget funds were moved. Bitget’s CEO asked the protocol to block the hackers, but THORChain refused, citing its “decentralized and permissionless” nature.

THORChain itself paused services earlier this year after being hacked for $10 million.

The freezing of Bitget’s funds and Tuesday’s service pause have prompted crypto users to question how decentralized NEAR Intents truly is.