NEAR Intents Sets 48-Hour Deadline for Stolen Funds Return

NEAR Intents has been dealing with the aftermath of a significant exploit that occurred on October 1, 2026. The attack resulted in the loss of approximately $3.8 million, mostly in USDT, from a treasury contract on BNB Chain. The root cause of the exploit was a bug in the protocol's Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure, which interacted with its smart contracts in an insecure way. The team quickly responded by halting services and patching the contract-side flaw within an hour of detection. Core services returned online shortly after, but some cross-chain features remained offline for longer while repairs continued. The attackers have been tracked to KuCoin, where the stolen assets were converted to Bitcoin. The NEAR Intents team is working with law enforcement and blockchain analytics firms to recover the funds, with a 48-hour deadline set for the return of the stolen assets. The protocol has also pledged to fully compensate affected users. This incident is not the first time NEAR Intents has been affected by an exploit, as the protocol had previously blocked a significant amount of suspicious transactions tied to a previous hack. The NEAR token dropped between 6% and 10% following the exploit announcement, despite the underlying NEAR Protocol and its other applications not being directly affected.