NEAR Intents reported that its SHIELD system blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the Bitget hack that occurred on Thursday. The exchange lost $387.5 million in the attack, with a significant portion of stolen funds moved across chains to Ethereum.
According to Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents, a protocol enabling cross-chain crypto asset swaps, the system detected and blocked the attempted transfers. NEAR Intents managed to freeze $503,000 in funds during execution, while approximately $166,000 in suspected stolen funds passed through to other providers.
NEAR Intents announced it will forgo the 10% total bounty offered by Bitget for freezing and recovering attacker funds, allowing more assets to be returned to the exchange. Shevchenko stated that frozen funds would be returned through an appropriate legal process.
The incident has raised tensions within the permissionless crypto ecosystem regarding the balance between open access and preventing illicit activity. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen called on THORChain, a decentralized protocol for cross-chain asset swaps, to refuse services to addresses linked to the attack. THORChain responded that it does not censor by design, though it has halted its network in the past as a broad emergency security measure.
Circle and Tether also took action on Friday, blacklisting a wallet linked to the Bitget exploiter and freezing $318,013 of USDT and USDC. Shevchenko emphasized that NEAR Intents would actively work to prevent the laundering of hacked funds, arguing that permissionless systems do not necessarily require neutrality and that refusing to facilitate stolen asset transfers aligns with protecting property rights.
