NEAR Intents says it blocked more than $50M tied to Bitget hackers

NEAR Intents says its SHIELD system blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the Bitget hack, as the stolen funds moved across chains and other providers handled the rest. For high-risk payment and crypto operators, the useful part here is not the headline number alone, but the growing split between permissionless infrastructure that can freeze certain flows and the parts of the stack that refuse to censor by design.

1. According to Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents, attackers stole $387.5 million from Bitget on Thursday, and a significant portion of those funds moved across chains to Ethereum.
2. Shevchenko said NEAR Intents’ SHIELD system detected and blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers, which then went to other providers. It also froze $503,000 in funds during execution, while around $166,000 in suspected stolen funds passed through.
3. NEAR Intents said it will forego the 5% bounty offered by Bitget for freezing attacker funds and the additional 5% for their recovery, which it said would allow more funds to be returned to Bitget. Shevchenko said the frozen funds would be returned through an appropriate legal process.
4. The case landed alongside pressure on THORChain to block addresses linked to the attack. THORChain said it does not censor by design, and that when it has halted the network in the past, it used an emergency security mechanism that affects the protocol broadly and “is not a selective freeze of specific funds or an individual swap.”
5. On Friday, Circle and Tether blacklisted a wallet linked to the Bitget exploiter, freezing $318,013 of USDt (USDT) and USDC (USDC), according to onchain data. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen also called on THORChain to refuse services to addresses linked to the attack.

The practical takeaway for PSPs and crypto infrastructure providers is simple: permissionless does not automatically mean hands-off, and different rails are making different choices about what they will and will not process when stolen funds start moving.