Bitwise NEAR ETF Faces Early Stress Test After $3.8M Ecosystem Exploit

The Bitwise NEAR ETF, trading under the ticker NRR, is facing an immediate market test just days after its debut on NYSE Arca. The fund, which launched on Sept. 29, saw $50 million in cumulative inflows by Sept. 30, but the underlying token price fell roughly 10% to $4.86 following a security breach at NEAR Intents.

NEAR Intents reported a $3.8 million loss after detecting a bug in the interaction between its Omni infrastructure and its smart contract. The project temporarily suspended services to patch the vulnerability. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin noted that the exploit was isolated to USDT on BSC and that the base NEAR blockchain remained unaffected, with block production and transaction processing continuing as normal.

Polosukhin stated that the team identified and fixed the issue within an hour and plans to compensate affected users. He added that the ecosystem intends to increase its use of formal verification and security tools, noting that the industry is facing increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

While the ETF provides exposure to the NEAR token rather than assets held within NEAR Intents, the price drop highlights how application-level issues can impact assets packaged for traditional investors. The incident comes at a time when the market structure for NEAR had already shifted; data from Santiment shows that NEAR-denominated futures open interest fell 21% between Sept. 21 and Sept. 29, even as the token price rose 86% during that period.

The upcoming flow data for the NRR fund will be a key indicator of whether institutional investors view the exploit as an isolated event or a reason to pull back. If inflows persist despite the recent volatility, it may suggest that buyers are separating ecosystem-specific risks from the investment case for the underlying network.