A security flaw in NEAR Intents’ cross-chain infrastructure led to an exploit involving about $3.8 million on Thursday, forcing the protocol to temporarily shut down parts of its platform.

Deposits and withdrawals were suspended across several blockchain networks as the team investigated the incident. NEAR Intents said it would fully reimburse users whose funds were affected.

The protocol said the attack resulted from a bug involving its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and a NEAR Intents smart contract. The affected contract has since been patched.

NEAR Intents Details the Attack

The cross-chain protocol is designed to simplify cryptocurrency swaps between different networks. Rather than requiring users to determine the appropriate bridge, exchange or routing path, they submit the desired transaction and allow independent market makers, or solvers, to compete to execute it.

NEAR Intents’ website says the system has facilitated more than $30 billion in volume across 35 blockchains.

The project stressed that the vulnerability was found in its cross-chain infrastructure and did not constitute an exploit of the underlying NEAR Protocol blockchain.

NEAR, the native token of the associated blockchain ecosystem, was down roughly 6% over the previous 24 hours, trading at about $4.94 at the time of writing.

Another Major Security Incident for Crypto

The exploit adds to a series of large cryptocurrency security incidents reported this year.

Bitget suffered an attack the previous week that resulted in more than $350 million in stolen assets. DefiLlama data lists other major losses, including approximately $320 million from Liquid Network, $295 million from Drift and $293 million from Kelp.

NEAR Intents said it has notified law enforcement and is working alongside security companies and blockchain analytics firms to follow the movement of the stolen funds.

ZachXBT said the attacker began by making abnormal withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet associated with NEAR Intents. The investigator said the assets were later transferred to KuCoin before being bridged to Bitcoin.

Several Chains See Service Disruptions

The protocol said its core services were expected to return relatively soon, but warned that deposits and withdrawals on several networks would take longer to restore while remediation work continued.

According to the status page, affected networks included BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll and Plasma.

NEAR Intents said the contract vulnerability has been fixed and that it will continue working to trace the funds and reimburse users impacted by the exploit.