The NEAR Intents fully recovered about US$ 3.8 million diverted in an exploit that hit its cross-chain infrastructure this week. Alex Shevchenko, the project's general manager, confirmed on Friday the 2nd that the assets had been returned and that the internal investigation would be closed.
The return occurred less than two days after the platform detected the incident and suspended part of its services. Before the recovery, Shevchenko said the team had identified the person responsible and set a deadline of 48 hours for the return of the funds through addresses made available for Bitcoin, BNB and Solana.
The executive did not disclose how the identity was determined. After the return of the assets, he limited himself to stating that the US$ 3.8 million had been returned in full and asked that researchers use bug bounty programs to report vulnerabilities.
Flaw hit Omni infrastructure and interrupted services
The incident began on October 1st, when NEAR Intents identified a flaw in the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and a platform smart contract. The vulnerability allowed the withdrawal of approximately US$ 3.8 million and led the company to temporarily halt its operations.
The flaw affected USDT on BNB Smart Chain, according to Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR. The NEAR blockchain, the NEAR token and other network applications were not compromised by the incident.
The vulnerability in the contract was fixed and the main services resumed operating after the initial suspension. Deposits and withdrawals remained temporarily unavailable on 11 networks, including BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, TON, Optimism and Avalanche, while the team was completing adjustments to the Omni infrastructure.
On-chain data indicated that a significant portion of the funds had been converted into Bitcoin after passing through KuCoin. The full recovery closes the main financial consequence of the attack, although NEAR Intents has not yet released a complete technical report on the vulnerability and the return process.
