The NEAR Intents incident appears to have been primarily caused by a bug in the cross-chain deposit and withdrawal layer. According to the official statement: There was a bug in the interaction between the Omni deposit/withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract. The vulnerability on the contract side has been patched. Initial losses are estimated at approximately $3.8 million, and full compensation is promised. Before analyzing the cause, let’s first understand what Intents actually are. Intents, commonly translated into Chinese as “intentions,” differ fundamentally from standard DEX trades. In a typical DEX trade, each transaction is explicitly defined: which liquidity pool to use, how many hops, what slippage tolerance, and on which chain to execute—all specified in a single signed transaction. In contrast, an Intent-based transaction is declarative: the user states only their desired outcome, leaving the path entirely open. What is signed is not a specific swap, but the condition the user wants fulfilled. For example: “Exchange 1 ETH for at least 2,500 USDC, valid for 30 minutes.” The signature covers this condition—not a specific swap route, counterparty, or whether to split the order. If no specific transaction is signed, who executes the user’s desired outcome? This is where the Solver role comes in—market makers, arbitrage bots, cross-chain bridges, etc.—compete to fulfill the user’s condition most efficiently. The Solver who delivers the best result under the constraints takes the job. The user doesn’t care about the path; they only care whether their conditions are met. Settlement still occurs via on-chain contracts. Currently, CoW Swap and UniswapX both implement this model, but only on a single chain. NEAR Intents is the cross-chain version built on NEAR: users express their intent on one chain, and Solvers search for liquidity across multiple chains. Asset transfers rely on the Omni deposit/withdrawal layer. The address from which funds were withdrawn is labeled in documentation as the HOT Bridge vault on BNB Chain—not NEAR Intents’ primary EVM vault. The vulnerability exploited was the interface between this cross-chain deposit/withdrawal channel and the Intents contract. The affected component is this cross-chain channel—not NEAR L1 itself. The exact nature of the flaw—whether it involved bypassed validations, duplicated balance entries, or misconfigured withdrawal permissions—remains under investigation pending the official post-mortem.