The cross-chain swap service paused, patched the bug and pledged full repayment. The NEAR token fell 8%, and Bitwise's NEAR ETF, two sessions old, fell 7.7%. Third-quarter losses across the industry reached $1.26 billion.
The latest crypto exploit was small. Its timing made it larger.
NEAR Intents, a cross-chain service that executes swaps across blockchains, paused operations on Thursday after an exploit that cost about $3.8 million. The loss was limited to USDT on the BNB Smart Chain and stemmed from a bug in the interaction between the service's Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the Intents smart contract, according to posts from NEAR Intents and co-founder Illia Polosukhin.
The flaw was fixed within about an hour, the team said. "All of the affected users will be compensated in full," NEAR Intents said, adding that the incident had been reported to law enforcement. The team said the core NEAR Protocol was not affected. The service resumed, with deposits and withdrawals restricted for about 12 hours on 11 networks.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT traced irregular outflows from a BSC hot wallet, with funds sent to the KuCoin exchange and bridged to bitcoin.
Two days into an ETF
The NEAR token fell about 8% to $4.91, after touching $5.51 earlier in the day. The Bitwise NEAR ETF, which began trading on Sept. 29, fell about 7.7% to $25.67. On Sept. 30 it took in $14.04 million, the only net inflow among U.S. crypto ETFs that day.
Two days earlier, NEAR Intents had said it blocked more than $50 million of attempts to launder proceeds from the Bitget hack through its service.
The quarter
Security firm CertiK counted $1.26 billion of losses from hacks and exploits in the third quarter, across 247 incidents. That is up about 54% from $819.4 million in the second quarter. September alone accounted for $768.5 million across 99 incidents, the worst month of 2026 and about 61% of the quarter. Losses for the year to date total $2.68 billion. The Bitget hack represented about 31% of the third-quarter figure.
At $3.8 million, the NEAR Intents loss is about 0.3% of the quarter's total.
Two readings
One reading is that a fully reimbursed, quickly patched bug in a cross-chain service does not change the case for the NEAR network, and that the token's 8% drop reflects positioning around a new ETF more than the size of the loss.
A second reading is that security has become a risk factor ETF holders now carry. A single-asset fund's value moves with incidents in its ecosystem's services, and losses across the industry rose by more than half in a quarter when prices and fund flows recovered.
The postmortem
NEAR Intents' full account of the bug, and confirmation that every affected user has been repaid, are the next steps. Flows into the NEAR ETF over the coming sessions will show whether new holders treat the incident as noise.