NEAR Intents, the cross-chain trading protocol hit by a $3.8 million exploit on Oct. 1, got all of the money back from the attacker on Friday and closed its investigation.
“The funds from the $3.8M NEAR Intents hack were sent back in full,” general manager Alex Shevchenko wrote on X. “We are stopping the investigation.”
The return came roughly 14 hours after Shevchenko called out the attacker in public and posted Bitcoin, BNB/Ethereum and Solana addresses for the funds. “We have identified you, sir,” he wrote, telling the attacker they knew “better than most how responsible disclosure works” and had 48 hours to use it.
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Funds Came Back Onchain
The Bitcoin address Shevchenko listed took in about 34.6 BTC over several transfers between 14:31 and 15:05 UTC on Friday, according to blockchain data. That did not cover the whole loss. An onchain researcher who goes by Kuncoro estimated the bitcoin was worth about 78% of the $3.8 million and asked whether the rest came back another way. “You are right. It did indeed,” Shevchenko replied, without saying how.
About an hour after the bitcoin arrived, a transaction to the BNB/Ethereum address carried a note in its data field: “We’ve returned all the funds, we were in the wrong.”
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the team identified “the party responsible less than 24h after the hack, established communication, and got the funds back in full” at 14:30 UTC. He credited SHIELD, the AI security layer on Intents, “along with some aggressive detective work.” Asked who did the tracing, Shevchenko answered “Internal team.” Neither executive detailed how the attacker was found.
A Bug in Omni Deposits and Withdrawals
NEAR Intents halted its services on Oct. 1, blaming “a bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with NEAR Intents smart contract.” It pledged to make affected users whole and said a detailed report would follow.
Polosukhin wrote that day that the flaw was confined to USDT on BSC and was patched in under an hour, and that the NEAR blockchain and its token were unaffected. He said Intents handles more than $4 billion a month in trading and payments, and called this its first major exploit.
The hack hit days after NEAR Intents blocked stolen Bitget funds from moving through the protocol.
Shevchenko asked hackers to “use bug bounties instead of disrupting the services,” and Polosukhin echoed him. “They exist for a reason,” he wrote.
Related Listen: How Bitget Is Chasing $388 Million in Stolen Funds After a Zero-Day Hack
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