Crypto’s privacy-focused swap tool NEAR Intents was briefly shut down on Thursday after an attacker took roughly $3.8 million, Decrypt reported. The flaw was in the layer responsible for moving money in and out and for how it talked to the main contract that holds user funds.
Core services came back within about an hour after the contract-side hole was patched. Deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks — among them BNB Chain, Polygon and Optimism — remained down for another 12 hours while the rest of the fix went in. The team said every affected user will be repaid in full.
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ZachXBT traced the stolen funds to KuCoin, where they were converted into bitcoin. NEAR Intents says it reported the incident to law enforcement and that a full report is coming.
Key facts
- An attacker took about $3.8 million from NEAR Intents, exploiting a flaw in the deposit and withdrawal layer and its communication with the main user-funds contract.
- Core services recovered in roughly an hour; deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks stayed offline for another 12 hours.
- NEAR fell nearly 9% to $4.86, and the Bitwise NEAR ETF shed more than 7%.
- ZachXBT traced the stolen funds to KuCoin, where they were converted to bitcoin.
- NEAR Intents has handled more than $30 billion in swaps across 35 networks.
A fast fix in a crowded field of damaging hacks
Judged against other incidents, the damage was contained. Decrypt’s Morning Minute noted that Kelp DAO was exploited for hundreds of millions of dollars, Bitget lost $387.5 million and froze withdrawals for four days, and MetaMask pulled its validators offline and has said almost nothing since.
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NEAR Intents found the bug, stopped the service, patched it, restarted in an hour, named the problem publicly, contacted law enforcement and committed to making users whole — which is why some observers have taken to calling it a “bullish hack,” in the mold of the ZCash exploit found by that project’s own team.
The timing was awkward for product marketing: the Bitwise NEAR ETF launched two days before the incident, so its first week included a hack of the exact product Bitwise cited as evidence the network was growing.
Why it matters
NEAR Intents has been one of the larger beneficiaries of the recent privacy boom, and the hack tested whether a cross-chain privacy tool can fail safely. The direct losses were small relative to other 2026 exploits, but the incident lands on a newly listed ETF and on the token’s holders. For users, the practical difference was hours rather than weeks of blocked withdrawals; for the project, the test is now whether reimbursements arrive as promised and whether a public report explains how the flaw escaped review.
What to watch
The team’s promised full incident report is the next concrete milestone, along with confirmation that affected users have been repaid. On the market side, NEAR’s move — nearly 9% down to $4.86 — and the Bitwise ETF’s first-week flows will indicate whether traders treat this as an isolated patch or an ongoing risk.
This article is not financial advice. Crypto markets are volatile and uncertain, and prices can move sharply in either direction.
Source: Decrypt
