NEAR Co-Founder Responds to $3.8M Intents Hack: Bug Patched Within an Hour, Formal Verification Coming

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia said on X on Oct. 1 that the cross-chain protocol NEAR Intents lost about $3.8 million to an attacker who exploited a bug in how the Omni deposit/withdrawal infrastructure interacts with the Intents smart contracts. Only USDT on BNB Smart Chain (BSC) was affected. The AI security layer SHIELD flagged the abnormal behavior and the service was paused; the bug was fixed within about an hour. NEAR Intents and near.com are back online, while a few chains such as Polygon and Optimism remain paused for about 12 hours pending Omni fixes. Illia said all affected users will be compensated in full and that the core NEAR Protocol, the NEAR token and other apps in the ecosystem were not affected. He added that NEAR Intents handles about $4 billion in monthly volume, and that the ecosystem is building a formal verification system for smart contracts and urged peers to join the SHIELD network.