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When hundreds of millions of dollars vanish from a crypto exchange, the scramble that follows reveals something important: how much of the industry’s infrastructure is actually willing to stop a thief. The Bitget hack, which saw attackers drain $387.5 million from the exchange on Thursday, has become the latest stress test for that question, and the answers are not uniform.
NEAR Intents, a cross-chain asset swap protocol, announced this week that its SHIELD system detected and blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the Bitget exploit. A significant portion of the stolen funds had moved across blockchains to Ethereum, according to Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents. Of the funds that reached NEAR Intents directly, the protocol managed to freeze $503,000 during execution, while approximately $166,000 in suspected stolen funds slipped through before being caught. The blocked $50 million, Shevchenko clarified, subsequently moved on to other providers rather than being frozen outright.
What NEAR Intents Actually Did, and What It Could Not
The distinction between blocking and freezing matters here. NEAR Intents did not intercept $50 million and lock it in a vault. Its SHIELD system identified wallet addresses linked to the attack and refused to process their swap requests, which pushed those funds toward other platforms instead. Only the $503,000 caught mid-execution was genuinely frozen, with Shevchenko confirming it will be returned to Bitget through an appropriate legal process.
The protocol also declined the 5% bounty Bitget offered for freezing attacker funds, and a further 5% for recovery, so that a larger share of recovered assets could be returned to the exchange directly. That is a meaningful gesture, though it also costs NEAR Intents relatively little given that the frozen sum is a fraction of the total stolen.
Stablecoin issuers moved faster on the blacklisting front. Circle and Tether both blacklisted a wallet linked to the Bitget exploiter on Friday, freezing a combined $318,013 in USDT and USDC according to onchain data. Those issuers have centralised control over their tokens and can act unilaterally, which is precisely why their response was quicker and more definitive than anything a decentralised protocol can manage.
The Permissionless Dilemma That THORChain Refused to Resolve
The more philosophically charged confrontation of the week involved THORChain, a decentralised protocol designed for swapping assets between blockchains without a central authority. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen publicly called on THORChain to refuse services to addresses connected to the attack. THORChain declined, stating that it does not censor by design. The protocol acknowledged it has halted its entire network in the past, but described that as a broad emergency security mechanism rather than a selective freeze targeting specific funds or individual swaps.
That position is internally consistent with how THORChain was built, but it creates an obvious problem: a protocol that cannot distinguish between a legitimate user and a hacker carrying $387.5 million in stolen funds is, functionally, available to both on equal terms.
Shevchenko used this moment to argue for a different framing of what permissionless actually means. “The people who build these systems make choices about what those protocols enable. Refusing to help launder stolen assets is one of ours,” he said. He went further: “Property rights are fundamental to functioning markets. A financial system where stealing an asset gives you an unrestricted right to monetize it isn’t a freer system. It is simply a system that protects the thief. Such systems cannot become the economic backbone of the future.”
The argument is pointed and deliberately aimed at a strain of crypto ideology that treats any form of filtering as a betrayal of decentralisation. Shevchenko’s counter is that neutrality in the face of theft is itself a choice, and not a neutral one.
Why This Debate Has Real Stakes for Asian Crypto Users
Bitget is one of the more prominent exchanges serving retail traders across Asia, including in Malaysia and Singapore, making the $387.5 million loss directly relevant to the region’s crypto community. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen’s public pressure campaign against THORChain also signals that major exchanges are increasingly willing to name and shame infrastructure providers they believe are enabling laundering, even when those providers have no legal obligation to comply.
For regulators in the region, the episode illustrates the limits of exchange-level oversight. Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore and Malaysia’s Securities Commission can impose compliance requirements on licensed platforms, but the funds that left Bitget moved through cross-chain protocols and decentralised infrastructure that sits outside any single jurisdiction’s reach. The $166,000 that passed through NEAR Intents before being flagged, and the far larger sums that simply redirected to other providers after being blocked, show how porous the system remains even when individual actors behave responsibly.
The Bitget hack is still unfolding, and the full picture of how much is recoverable will take time to emerge. But the more durable question it raises is structural. As cross-chain infrastructure matures and handles ever-larger volumes, the industry faces a choice it has long deferred: whether protocols are passive pipes or participants with responsibilities. NEAR Intents has staked out one answer. The fact that $50 million simply rerouted elsewhere after being blocked suggests the rest of the ecosystem has not yet decided.
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