NEAR Intents Wrestles a Monero Problem After Winning Back Its $3.8M Exploit Funds
NEAR Intents has its money back. Converting it is turning into the annoying part.
The cross-chain trading protocol lost roughly $3.8 million on Oct 1, when a bug in its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure let an attacker drain funds tied to USDT on BNB Chain. The team halted services and said the contract-side flaw was patched in under an hour, promising affected users would be made whole. Then the attacker handed it back.
The return came in two pieces
General manager Alex Shevchenko said the funds came back in full and the investigation is closed. Not all of it landed as Bitcoin, though. The Bitcoin address he published took in about 34.6 BTC on Friday, which an onchain researcher estimated at roughly 78% of the total. The remainder had already been traded into Monero before the handover, and Shevchenko confirmed the shortfall without saying how much arrived as XMR.
Why Monero is a headache
NEAR Intents has already refilled its smart contracts from its own funds, so users are not left waiting on the recovery. The open task is turning the XMR into USDT, and that is where compliance shows up. The companies handling the conversion are asking where the money came from, and Shevchenko did not have a tidy answer ready. Those assets had moved through hard-to-trace channels before they came back, which is why the coins need cleaning up before anyone will touch them.
How the two sides actually talked
The private channel was built on the attacker's own key. After the attacker sent an onchain message asking for a Signal contact, Shevchenko posted an encrypted invite that only the attacker's private key could open.
Shevchenko said his first time dealing with Monero was during this hack, and he is pushing bug bounties instead of drama — one valid submission has already come in and will be paid. For anyone holding funds in bridges, the takeaway is blunt: getting the money back is not the finish line. Turning stolen crypto into clean, spendable dollars is a second project, and it comes with paperwork.