In April 2026, a single forged message drained approximately $292 million from one cross-chain protocol. This did not require any special exploits or new encryption. The attacker convinced the bridge that the transfer was approved, and the bridge made the payment.
The incident is not noteworthy in its context. Cross-chain bridges have lost more than $2.8 billion to date, nearly 40% of all the value ever stolen from Web3. The average bridge hack performs approximately 11 times more than the average non-bridge exploit. And here are the details that bother anyone building on this infrastructure. Bridges that lost hundreds of millions of dollars, including Wormhole and Ronin, were all audited first.
Intent-based execution protects Web3 users from bridges and high-risk portals
Now, this is the part that goes against the independent spirit of cryptocurrencies. Bridge steps are typically steps that the user is asked to take, such as selecting a route and approving a contract. It’s like being in control. In fact, this is the riskiest decision in the stack, handed to the person least equipped to evaluate it.
Another model has usurped that decision and the market is rapidly moving towards it.
Intent-based execution allows users to declare results instead of issuing instructions. You state what you hold and want, and a network of solvers compete to provide it. The winning solver chooses a route and solves it across the chain. The user never selects a bridge.
The clearest evidence that this is more than a white paper idea is the volume. $NEAR Intent, the most prominent intent-based layer, has surpassed $20 billion in cumulative trading volume in early June 2026 after more than 25 million swaps. It is the fastest growing cross-chain protocol in 2025, and its curve is steepening. It reached $5 billion late last year, then doubled to $10 billion by January, and reached $20 billion again within five months.
simple exchange and $NEAR Read intent-based execution push
It’s the adopters that make this case worth revisiting. SimpleSwap is a self-custodial swap aggregator that has been operating since 2018 and has served over 10 million users through every market cycle this space has ever experienced. It does not hold user balances and has routes across over 20 liquidity providers.
Added $NEAR Intended not as a headline grabber but as an infrastructure change to the routing layer.
“Intent-based providers behave differently at the infrastructure level: no wallet connectivity on the user side, results-driven execution, and clean API integration. This combination fits the way SimpleSwap is built and is the direction the liquidity layer should go.” Stefan Lauer, the company’s head of infrastructure, said:
$NEAR This integration is framed as arriving at a model that SimpleSwap already matches.
“SimpleSwap has built a reputation for making crypto easy to use, and that’s exactly why.” This integration is a perfect fit. By bringing $NEAR For our users, we are taking the complexity out of cross-chain transactions and making it easier for people to access the assets they want. We look forward to working with the team at SimpleSwap.— Dillon Freeman, Head of Partnerships, $NEAR.
How does intent-based execution work?
This is an idea that should give crypto readers pause. The doctrine of self-control is that everything is under your control. Intent-based execution requires you to forgo one particular choice, or route, while always managing your finances. Giving up that choice removes you from an attack surface that has cost the industry billions of dollars. This one location provides more safety with less route control.
Intent-based payments do not guarantee security. This reduces users’ exposure to bridge selection, but does not eliminate cross-chain risk. Abstraction layers still inherit the weaknesses of the networks they connect to.
The competition is also crowded. Solana and Ethereum are building their own chain abstraction stacks, and the window for a single protocol to own the model is closing.
What the SimpleSwap integration provides is weighted data points. If the eight-year-old self-custody venue with more than 10 million users treats manual exchanges as a thing of the past, that signal could be worth more than another launch announcement.
Whether the rest of the market buys in comes from volume and retention, not slogans.
