NEAR Intents Says It Has Identified Its Attacker and Gives 48 Hours to Return $3.8 Million

NEAR Intents, the cross-chain trading system built around solver-fulfilled user intents, says it has identified the person behind the $3.8 million exploit it suffered on 1 October and has given them 48 hours to return the funds. The team had already said the vulnerability was patched, that users will be compensated in full and that service would resume within the hour.

The root cause was not a single broken contract. CoinDesk reported that the loss followed a bug in how the Omni deposit and withdrawal system interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract, affecting deposits and withdrawals across several networks and forcing a pause. The failure landed in the seam between two components that behaved correctly in isolation. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the first irregular withdrawals to a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents, with funds routed to KuCoin and swapped into bitcoin.

The 48-hour ultimatum is a negotiating posture rather than an enforcement tool. Crypto Briefing reported the deadline came from the system's general manager, and teams that issue such deadlines are usually signalling that they hold off-chain identifying information and would prefer a quiet return to a referral. The intermediate outcome, which several 2026 incidents have produced, is a negotiated bounty.

The incident also shows what intent-based routing actually custodies. Users experience a single swap, while behind it sit hot wallets and solver balances on multiple chains. Those balances are the attack surface, and they are not reduced by removing a classic lock-and-mint bridge from the design.