NEAR Intents Reclaims $3.8 Million After Hacker Returns Funds
NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading protocol, has successfully recovered the $3.8 million stolen in a hack on October 1. The attacker returned all the funds less than 48 hours after the protocol’s general manager, Alex Shevchenko, publicly identified them and provided addresses for restitution.
Shevchenko announced the full recovery on Friday, stating that the investigation had concluded. The attacker sent 34.6 BTC, roughly 78% of the stolen amount, to the provided Bitcoin address. The remaining funds were returned through another method, as confirmed by Shevchenko in response to an onchain researcher.
A transaction to the BNB/Ethereum address included a message: “We’ve returned all the funds, we were in the wrong.” NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin credited the AI security layer SHIELD and the team’s investigative efforts for identifying and communicating with the attacker within 24 hours.
The exploit occurred due to a bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacting with NEAR Intents’ smart contract. The flaw, limited to USDT on BSC, was patched within an hour. NEAR Intents handles over $4 billion monthly in trading and payments, marking this as its first major exploit.