NEAR Intents Gets Full $3.8M Back Within 48-Hour Window; Two Outlets Confirm

Roughly $3.8 million taken from NEAR Intents in an exploit on Thursday, October 1, has been returned in full. The repayment came after the team said it had identified the person responsible and set a 48-hour deadline for the funds to come back. Two independent outlets, Decrypt and Cointelegraph, both report the full recovery and the ultimatum that preceded it.

Nothing was lost in the end. For users of the cross-chain intents service, that is the number that counts.

Source Check: What Two Outlets Agree On

Cryptaur’s verification baseline for this story rests on four facts carried by both reports. The drained amount was about $3.8 million. The incident happened on Thursday. NEAR Intents said it had identified the attacker and gave a 48-hour window to return the money. The entire sum was then sent back.

The two reports frame the timeline slightly differently. Decrypt places the return a day after the identification announcement, while Cointelegraph describes the announcement and the recovery as both landing on Friday, October 2. Either way, the funds came back well inside the stated 48 hours.

Single-Source Details: The Bug, the Quote and the Fund Trail

Several specifics appear only in Cointelegraph’s coverage, so we treat them as reported rather than independently confirmed. According to that outlet, NEAR Intents paused services after detecting a “bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with NEAR Intents smart contract.” Its preliminary investigation put user losses at $3.8 million, and the team pledged to compensate affected users in full.

Cointelegraph also cites general manager Alex Shevchenko, who wrote on X that the funds “were sent back in full” and added: “We are stopping the investigation. Please use bug bounties instead of disrupting the services.” The same report said the ultimatum was issued under “responsible disclosure” terms.

On the movement of funds, Cointelegraph reported that blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the stolen assets to the KuCoin exchange and found they had been bridged to Bitcoin. Decrypt’s report does not carry that trail, so the routing remains a one-outlet account for now.

Read more: Three DeFi Hacks, One Day: Payy Loses $1.8M, Duelbits $7M, Meter $2.3M

Reading the NEAR Price Snapshot Carefully

Decrypt’s price ticker displayed NEAR at $4.88, up 4.37%, alongside its coverage. That figure is an aggregated snapshot with no timestamp attached. Cointelegraph’s ticker did not list NEAR at all, so there is no second reading to cross-check it against. Neither outlet links the token’s move to the recovery, and Cryptaur does not either.

For context, both tickers placed Bitcoin near $85,100 and Ether near $2,695 at the time of capture. The two readings sit within about $20 and $2 of each other respectively, which is ordinary drift between data feeds sampled at slightly different moments.

Open Questions After the Return

Several points are still unanswered in the available reporting. Neither outlet says whether NEAR Intents has fully resumed the paused services, whether the returning party received any bounty, or whether the Omni-related bug has been patched. The identity behind the exploit has not been made public in either report.

Users who held balances during the pause should watch the project’s official channels for a restart notice and any technical post-mortem. Per Shevchenko’s statement as reported by Cointelegraph, the investigation into the $3.8 million incident was closed on October 2 once the funds were back.

Sources

• decrypt.co
• cointelegraph.com