Wall Street arrived in NEAR just as a $4 billion-a-month app got hacked

NEAR’s new US ETF is facing its first stress test days after launch as a $3.8 million ecosystem exploit hit the token.

NEAR fell about 10% to $4.86 after NEAR Intents disclosed a security incident involving its Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure. The selloff came less than two days after Bitwise opened the token to US exchange-traded fund investors through its NEAR ETF, with the ticker NRR.

The fund began trading on NYSE Arca on Sept. 29 and attracted $35.5 million of net inflows on its first day. By Sept. 30, cumulative inflows had risen to over $50 million, while total net assets reached $52.8 million, equivalent to about 0.76% of NEAR’s market capitalization, according to SoSoValue data.

That timing gives the newly launched product an unusually early test of investor conviction. The ETF protects buyers from the operational burden of wallets, private keys, and direct staking, but its value still moves with NEAR, leaving shareholders exposed when problems elsewhere in the ecosystem undermine confidence in the token.

In an X statement, NEAR Intents said it temporarily halted services after detecting what it described as a bug in the interaction between its Omni infrastructure and the Intents smart contract.

The preliminary loss was about $3.8 million, and the project said it would fully compensate affected users. The team patched the contract vulnerability, and NEAR Intents and near.com resumed operations after a temporary suspension.

Some deposit and withdrawal routes remained unavailable for longer while the team completed fixes to Omni infrastructure covering networks including BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar and Scroll.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the exploit was isolated to USDT on BSC and that NEAR Intents’ SHIELD security system detected unusual activity before pausing services. He said the team identified and fixed the vulnerability within an hour.

The base NEAR blockchain continued operating throughout the incident. NEAR Protocol said the exploit did not involve a vulnerability in the network or the native NEAR token, and that block production and transaction processing continued without interruption.

That separation limits the direct operational impact on Bitwise’s ETF, which holds exposure to NEAR rather than assets deposited through NEAR Intents. The market reaction nevertheless shows how quickly application-level failures can feed through to an asset newly packaged for traditional investors.