NEAR Intents recovers full $3.8 million after October exploit

NEAR Intents announced it has fully recovered the $3.8 million stolen in an exploit on October 1. The team identified the attacker within 24 hours and successfully retrieved all funds by October 5. General Manager Alex Shevchenko confirmed the recovery, noting that the Bitcoin address he had publicly listed received about 34.6 BTC in multiple transactions. The rest of the funds were returned through unspecified channels.

The exploit was traced to a flaw in Omni’s deposit and withdrawal system interacting with a NEAR Intents smart contract. This issue specifically impacted USDT on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), but the team resolved it within an hour. NEAR Intents had committed to reimbursing affected users in full.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin credited SHIELD, a security layer on Intents, and internal investigations for the swift resolution. The team established communication with the attacker shortly after the hack, leading to the funds' return. A transaction message acknowledged the mistake and confirmed the full recovery.