NEAR Protocol dropped about 10% days after its first US ETF began trading, after NEAR Intents disclosed a $3.8 million exploit in its Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure. The team says it will fully compensate affected users and has patched the vulnerability, but the incident gives Bitwise's new NRR fund an early test of investor conviction.
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 ETF investors through its NEAR ETF, 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, with net assets reaching $52.8 million, about 0.76% of NEAR's market capitalization, according to SoSoValue data.
A $3.8 million exploit hits NEAR Intents
NEAR Intents said in an X statement that it temporarily halted services after detecting a bug in the interaction between its Omni infrastructure and the Intents smart contract. The team put the preliminary loss at about $3.8 million and said it would fully compensate affected users. It then patched the vulnerability and resumed operations after a temporary suspension, though some deposit and withdrawal routes stayed down longer while fixes were completed across networks including BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, and Scroll.
Co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the exploit was isolated to USDT on BSC and that the project's SHIELD security system flagged unusual activity before services paused, with the team fixing the vulnerability within an hour. The base NEAR blockchain kept operating throughout, and NEAR Protocol said the exploit did not touch the network or the native NEAR token.
That separation limits the direct hit to Bitwise's ETF, which holds exposure to NEAR rather than assets deposited through NEAR Intents. Still, Polosukhin said the service now processes more than $4 billion a month in trading and payments volume. According to Polosukhin: "The crypto space is entering a new era of far more sophisticated cyber attacks." The team has reported the incident to law enforcement and is working with blockchain analytics firms to trace the stolen funds.
Leverage had already thinned before the ETF launch
Santiment said NEAR-denominated futures open interest peaked at roughly 215 million NEAR on Sept. 21, eight days before the ETF launch. It then dropped about 21% to 169 million NEAR by Sept. 29, even as the price had risen roughly 86% from Sept. 16. Dollar-denominated open interest kept climbing, reaching about $1 billion on Sept. 27, but the falling coin-denominated figure suggests leverage was already thinning before NRR opened.
If inflows continue despite the drop, investors would be signaling that they can separate an application-specific exploit from the investment case for the underlying network. A reversal would instead show how quickly an ecosystem security event can interrupt demand for a fund that has existed for only a handful of trading sessions.
Source: CryptoSlate
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