One challenge that persisted in crypto is that almost intentional way of communicating complexity publicly. This among other things what leads to proliferation of scams as it’s easy for non experts to get lost in all the jargon and hard to distinguish what is real innovation. Same is happening now - cryptographers sharing the possible risks in current schemes publicly without either explaining that other solutions are already in the works or giving historic context that cryptography has been evolving over past 50 years and has advanced every time to get ahead of found issues. Leaders in the space must uplevel comms to explain things simpler and bring pragmatic solutions to market.

Earlier today, NEAR Intents was exploited for $3.8m. SHIELD, the AI security layer on Intents, detected outlier behavior and Intents were temporarily paused. All of the affected users will be compensated in full. The attacker exploited a bug in the Omni deposit/withdrawal interaction with the NEAR Intents smart contract isolated to USDT on BSC. The Intents team quickly identified the exact vulnerability and it was fixed within an hour of detection. NEAR Intents and near.com are already back online, except for a few affected chains on Intents. The core NEAR Protocol, NEAR token, and other applications on NEAR were not affected. NEAR Intents now processes over $4B a month in trading and payments volume, serving as the industry’s connector across chains and ecosystems. At this scale, we have to hold ourselves to a higher security standard. This was the first major exploit on Intents and we will apply all learnings from this incident as part of a full retro and postmortem. The crypto space is entering a new era of far more sophisticated cyber attacks. Recently, we have seen BitGet, Metamask, Lido all being targeted by criminals equipped with AI systems that are continuously trying to hack all infrastructure. As a space, we need to be far more vigilant and raise the bar on both onchain contract standards and offchain monitoring and proactive prevention. This includes incorporating formal verification, a key tool for preventing a large class of vulnerabilities. The NEAR ecosystem is already working on a formal verification system for NEAR contracts and will shortly implement it as part of the release process, alongside other security measures that will come out of the postmortem. Being more proactive against criminal activity is a critical step to ensure the growth and legitimacy of crypto. It’s time to join forces and work together to use all tools at our disposal to detect and prevent malicious activity. SHIELD is our approach to monitoring and AI-based outlier detection. We welcome new SHIELD partners to work with us to share information faster and get better at detecting and containing criminals and exploits across web3.