NEAR Intents Sees $3.8 Million Exploit Funds Returned

NEAR Intents, a protocol for coordinating deposits, withdrawals, and cross-chain execution across several networks, has reported that the $3.8 million lost in an exploit has been returned. The funds were transferred through KuCoin and then bridged into Bitcoin, but the base NEAR chain itself was not compromised, according to initial analysis.

The protocol had already committed to compensate the loss before the funds came back, so the return affects the protocol's balance sheet rather than the reimbursement it owed users. NEAR Intents' general manager Alex Shevchenko said the funds were returned in full, but the larger cross-chain lesson remains unsettled until a post-mortem explains the flaw and the recovery path in detail.

The incident involved a bug in the interaction between NEAR Intents' Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and an Intents smart contract. The flaw was on the contract side and was patched shortly after detection. NEAR Intents reported the incident to law enforcement and security and blockchain analytics firms assisted with tracing and recovery.