Near Intents Halts After $3.8M Exploit, Days After Blocking $50M Bitget Hacker Swap

Near Intents, a cross-chain crypto swap service, halted operations on Oct. 1 after an attacker drained about $3.8 million through a bug in its Omni deposit and withdrawal layer's interaction with its smart contract. The team said the contract-side flaw is patched and core services should resume within an hour. The exploit came two days after Near Intents blocked a $50 million swap attempt by the Bitget hacker, who stole roughly $387.5 million from the exchange last week. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen and Elliptic linked that hack to North Korea; no connection between the incidents has been confirmed. NEAR fell 8.93% to $4.86, and Bitwise's newly launched Near ETF dropped more than 7%. Deposits and withdrawals on 11 networks, including BNB Chain, Polygon and Optimism, remain down for about 12 hours. Near Intents said lost funds "will be compensated in full."