No crypto exploit is good news, but Wednesday’' SWEAT protocol attack is about as good as they come. According to a post-hack debrief, the SWEAT team confirmed that "ALL external account balances have been fully restored and operations are back to normal."

At about 13:36 UTC, an attacker began exploiting a vulnerability in the Near protocol-based (SWEAT) token contract, allowing him to drain funds from the top 100 SWEAT holder accounts. Crypto security firm Blockaid, which flagged the exploit, noted multiple Sweat Foundation accounts were completely drained within a 30-second window.

However, the team was able to quickly pause the token contract and contact MEXC and Rhea Finance, which the attacker was using to liquidate funds. At one point, the attacker had control of roughly 13.71 billion SWEAT, about 65% of the total supply, worth about $3.5 million at the time.

Crypto exchange MEXC froze the attacker’s account, while Near-based onchain liquidity provider Rhea paused SWEAT trading.

In the end, all user funds were restored and operations returned to normal. The team said it plans to file an incident report with relevant law enforcement agencies and perform a more detailed forensic analysis to provide a post-mortem of the attack.

SWEAT, also known as Sweat Economy, is a so-called "move-to-earn" application deployed on the Near blockchain that pays out tokens for walking.

"We deeply appreciate the support and advice from the community that helped us to resolve this quickly," Sweat wrote in a post on X.

The attack comes in the wake of two massive attacks recently, including the $280 million Drift protocol attack, representing the largest Solana-based exploit to date, and the $292 million Kelp DAO hack, which has reverberated across DeFi, causing the sector's TVL to tank in recent days.

Although exploits continue to be a massive, seemingly unstoppable problem in crypto, a community effort called DeFi United has organized to backstop losses from the Kelp DAO attack. The SWEAT attack also represents the improving ability for protocols to respond to threats in real-time and collaborate with industry participants to mitigate potential damages.