NEAR Intents Says It Recovered $3.8 Million After Oct. 1 Exploit

NEAR Intents said it recovered the full $3.8 million taken in an Oct. 1 exploit, bringing the incident to a close after the team identified the responsible party within 24 hours of the hack.

General Manager Alex Shevchenko said the team was ending its investigation. The funds returned Friday, about 14 hours after his public post calling out the attacker and listing addresses for returns.

The Bitcoin (BTC) address Shevchenko posted received about 34.6 BTC in several transfers Friday. Shevchenko confirmed the rest of the funds had returned but did not say how. A transaction to the address posted for BNB/Ethereum returns carried a message acknowledging that all funds had been returned and that the sender was in the wrong.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the team identified the responsible party less than 24 hours after the hack, established communication and recovered the funds. He credited SHIELD, a security layer on Intents, along with internal investigative work.

The exploit involved a flaw in how Omni’s deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with a NEAR Intents smart contract. The issue affected only USDT on BSC, and the team fixed it within an hour. NEAR Intents had pledged to reimburse affected users in full. The incident’s initial loss was about $3.8 million, as covered in TokenPost’s report on the cross-chain exploit.