'We Have Identified You, Sir': Near Intents Recovers $3.8 Million After 48-Hour Ultimatum

Near Intents said Friday that the roughly $3.8 million taken in a Thursday exploit was returned in full and that the team has ended its investigation. The company’s general manager, Alex Shevchenko, posted the recovery on X and confirmed the funds were sent back, enabling the project to stop its probe. The team had publicly named and addressed the exploiter the day before, posting cryptocurrency addresses for returning the money and stating "We have identified you, sir," while giving the attacker a 48-hour window to hand the funds back. Shevchenko framed the demand as an opportunity for responsible disclosure and urged others to use bug bounties rather than exploit vulnerabilities. An on-chain message that appears to be from the exploiter accompanied the returned funds and read, in part, "We've returned all the funds, we were in the wrong." The note also thanked the Near Intents team for civility during the process and encouraged the use of bug bounties. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT reported that the stolen funds had at one point been moved to KuCoin and bridged to Bitcoin. Near Intents had paused service after the incident when a flaw in how its Omni layer interacted with the main smart contract allowed funds to be siphoned. The service, which offers cross-chain swaps across 35 blockchains and has handled more than $30 billion in swaps according to its data, pledged to compensate users fully and notified law enforcement. The incident followed other recent market turmoil, including a blocked $50 million swap attempt linked to the actor behind the roughly $387.5 million Bitget breach.