NEAR Intents released a post-mortem report, revealing that the $3.8 million vulnerability originated from a deposit notification flaw

The cross-chain exchange protocol NEAR Intents released a post-mortem report attributing a $3.8 million vulnerability to a flaw in the deposit notification feature. The protocol deploys a public settlement contract on NEAR that maintains an internal ledger of deposited tokens, while withdrawals transfer tokens out via a cross-chain bridge. The report was published by NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko on October 16, stating that the attacker withdrew $3.8 million before the protocol was shut down on October 1 and returned all funds within 36 hours of detection, with all affected users fully compensated.

The report indicates that the feature notifies third-party contracts when tokens are deposited. The attacker created a contract that intentionally caused the notification to fail, allowing the token contract to refund the deposit while NEAR Intents retained the corresponding ledger credit. Through 23 failed deposit transactions, the attacker accumulated $3.8 million in unsupported balance, referred to in the report as ghost funds, and subsequently withdrew real tokens based on this and transferred them to other chains via the Omni infrastructure. Shevchenko stated that this was a vulnerability in the NEAR Intents contract, not in the Omni infrastructure.

Withdrawals occurred between September 29 and October 1. The settlement contract was paused and reopened on October 1, with affected routes gradually restored, and contract-side deposits resumed on October 2. The report noted that the vulnerability went undetected because monitoring only compared the original chain assets with the total balance of NEAR side tokens, without comparing the total internal user balances with the actual tokens held by the contract; the team has since added this check and will automatically pause the contract when there is a balance inconsistency. The fix for the October vulnerability was deployed on October 2, but another serious vulnerability report regarding the same feature prompted its complete removal on October 7, with the relevant researcher receiving a $300,000 reward.