NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko has identified the attacker responsible for a recent $3.8 million exploit and issued a 48-hour ultimatum for the return of the stolen funds. The security incident stemmed from a bug in the platform's Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure, which interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract.
Addressing the hacker directly on X, Shevchenko stated that they had been identified and urged them to return the funds to specified Bitcoin, BNB, Ethereum, and Solana addresses. He noted that the disclosure window would close after 48 hours.
According to the platform, services were temporarily halted following the detection of the security incident. Illia Polosukhin, a NEAR co-founder, confirmed that the exploit was isolated to USDT on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC), and that the core NEAR blockchain and its native NEAR token were unaffected. The contract vulnerability was patched within an hour of detection, and the SHIELD security layer flagged the outlier behavior to trigger the system pause.
While deposits and withdrawals across multiple other networks remained unavailable for about 12 additional hours while Omni fixes were completed, NEAR Intents announced plans to compensate affected users in full. The incident has also been reported to law enforcement, and investigators are working with blockchain analytics partners to trace the assets.
Polosukhin noted that the platform processes over $4 billion a month, marking this as its first major exploit. In response to the broader security landscape, NEAR Intents plans to incorporate formal verification into its contract release process and invite new SHIELD partners to improve information sharing.
