Sweat Economy Restores Drained Balances After NEAR Exploit Siphons 67% of SWEAT Supply

Sweat Economy said it has fully restored all affected external account balances after an attacker exploited a flaw in the $SWEAT token contract on NEAR Protocol, siphoning about 13.71 billion tokens valued at roughly $2–$2.5 million from the project’s top 100 holder accounts. Blockaid analytics said the exploit occurred at around 13:36 UTC on April 29 and emptied targeted accounts in roughly 30 seconds. The attacker deployed a drain smart contract and attempted to sell the stolen SWEAT via MEXC and Rhea Finance. Sweat paused the token contract immediately. MEXC froze the attacker’s account, Rhea Finance halted SWEAT trading, and the team deployed a patched token contract. The Sweat Foundation said user funds have now been returned. The project plans to file an incident report with law enforcement, work with MEXC to recover the frozen tokens, and publish a detailed forensic postmortem. SWEAT smart contracts have also been temporarily removed from public view pending a comprehensive audit. The incident adds to what is shaping up as the worst month on record for DeFi security, with April 2026 losses surpassing $800 million, including Drift Protocol’s $285 million hack and KelpDAO’s $293 million bridge breach.