NEAR fell about 10% to $4.86 after NEAR Intents disclosed a $3.8 million exploit affecting its Omni deposit-and-withdrawal infrastructure, creating an early stress test for Bitwise’s newly launched NEAR ETF. Trading under the ticker NRR on NYSE Arca since Sept. 29, the fund drew $35.5 million in first-day net inflows and more than $50 million by Sept. 30, when its net assets reached $52.8 million, or about 0.76% of NEAR’s market capitalization. The incident involved a bug between Omni and the Intents smart contract (self-executing blockchain code), not the base NEAR network or the native token. NEAR Intents temporarily halted services, patched the vulnerability and said it would fully compensate affected users. Some routes across networks including BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar and Scroll remained unavailable while further fixes were completed. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the exploit was isolated to USDT on BSC and detected by the SHIELD security system, with the vulnerability identified and fixed within an hour. The service processes more than $4 billion a month in trading and payments volume. The team has reported the incident to law enforcement, is working with blockchain analytics and security firms to trace the funds, and expects a fuller postmortem in the coming days. Polosukhin said the ecosystem would expand formal verification and other security measures. The market reaction came after NEAR futures open interest had already declined from roughly 215 million NEAR on Sept. 21 to 169 million on Sept. 29, even as the token price rose about 86% from Sept. 16. Santiment said dollar-denominated open interest reached about $1 billion on Sept. 27, while the falling number of NEAR committed to derivatives indicated that leverage was thinning. Continued ETF inflows despite the decline would suggest investors are separating the application-specific exploit from the underlying network, while reversed flows would show how quickly an ecosystem security event can disrupt demand for a newly launched fund.