Sweat Economy hack — April 2026

Starting at about 13:36 UTC on 29 April 2026, an attacker emptied a set of large SWEAT token accounts on NEAR in roughly thirty seconds. Reporting describes the targets as the top 100 holder accounts, several of them controlled by the Sweat Foundation. About 13.71 billion SWEAT, roughly two thirds of the supply, was moved.

The attacker used a purpose-built drainer contract to sweep the balances — CoinDesk reported it contained an "exploit-resolve" module written in Rust — then routed proceeds through Ref Finance on NEAR and across the Wormhole/Portal bridge, splitting them between wallets and chains. The cause was a flaw in the SWEAT token contract itself; DefiLlama records the technique as an exploit of the contract's refund_first and refund_second functions, the same built-in refund path Sweat later used to restore balances. Sweat has not published a detailed post-mortem of its own and said forensic analysis was still running.

Dollar figures vary. Blockaid valued the 13.71 billion drained tokens at about $2.63m, and separately estimated the attacker controlled roughly $3.46m across about 17.71 billion tokens at various stages of the laundering path. The independent investigator SomaXBT put the drain at about $2.5m. Several outlets, and DefiLlama, report $3.5m; CoinCentral and DeFi Planet apply that figure to the 13.71 billion actually drained. The two Blockaid figures imply the same unit price of about $0.000193 per token, so the higher number most plausibly reflects the attacker's total holding rather than the amount taken from the accounts — but no source states that reconciliation, and it should be read as an inference.

Sweat paused the token contract within minutes. MEXC froze the attacker's deposit account and Rhea Finance halted SWEAT trading pairs, so little of the stolen supply appears to have been sold. The same evening Sweat deployed a patched contract and used the built-in refund mechanism to restore balances, later stating that all external account balances had been fully restored and that all remaining SWEAT had been returned. Sweat said it filed a report with law enforcement. No suspect has been named.