NEAR Intents blocked more than $50 million in transfers tied to last week's $388 million Bitget hack, while THORChain processed $6.3 million in swaps from the same theft and refused to freeze the addresses. The split has reopened a fight over what "permissionless" means once stolen money is moving through the pipes.
NEAR Intents blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the $388 million drained from Bitget last week, according to a report from the service's general manager, Alex Shevchenko. THORChain, the largest decentralized swap network, processed about $6.3 million in ether-to-bitcoin swaps from a wallet tied to the same attack and declined Bitget's request to block the addresses involved.
Screening on live attacker money
NEAR's screening system, SHIELD, froze about $503,000 mid-transaction while roughly $166,000 passed through before detection caught up. The $50 million figure counts refused transfer attempts with duplicates removed and carries an error margin of about 10%, Shevchenko wrote. SHIELD checks quote flows against AML data from TRM Labs, AMLBot, PureFi and Binance alongside an internal database. NEAR routinely processes more than $100 million in daily volume, Shevchenko noted, so the refused transfers cost the service little of its ordinary flow.
A permissionless label under pressure
NEAR markets itself as permissionless and uncensorable, yet a service that can freeze funds mid-swap is doing something closer to permissioned. Technical writer Vini Barbosa argued permissionless has to mean neutral toward every user. Cofounder Illia Polosukhin countered that permissionless means nobody needs permission to own, transfer or deploy contracts, leaving the service permissionless in name but bounded in practice.
THORChain took the opposite stance in public. According to THORChain: "THORChain is permissionless and doesn't censor by design." The protocol noted that addresses which took $10.7 million from its own vaults in May were never blacklisted, and the same held after the $1.5 billion Bybit theft last year. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen pushed back, framing decentralization as a design principle rather than a shield for facilitating stolen funds. OKX founder Star Xu argued that THORChain's validators jointly control its vaults, which makes the network an intermediary rather than a base layer.
A frozen sum with no owner of record
Circle and Tether froze about $320,000 in USDC and USDT linked to the Bitget breach, a small amount against the total loss but still the most reliable circuit breaker in crypto because it acts on the stablecoin itself rather than the application moving it. NEAR is holding its intercepted $503,000 pending a legal process and has waived any recovery bounty Bitget offered; formal claims route through a Kodex law-enforcement portal. Shevchenko's report names no authority who can order a release and describes no process for a wrongly flagged user to recover funds, leaving the first dispute over that sum to test whether the freeze follows a rule anyone can see.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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