NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin defended NEAR Intents’ decision to stop funds tied to the Bitget hack, arguing on Monday that an open blockchain does not require every app built on it to handle every trade.
“Permissionless means nobody needs permission to own and transfer assets, or deploy contracts on NEAR,” Polosukhin wrote on X. “It does not mean every application or liquidity provider must process every transaction.”
His post came hours after Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain trading protocol, disclosed that attackers tried to push more than $50 million of stolen funds through NEAR Intents. About $166,000 got through, and $503,000 was frozen partway through execution, Shevchenko said. Those funds “remain restricted pending the appropriate legal and recovery process,” he added.
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How SHIELD Works
The blocking came from SHIELD, a risk-intelligence layer that Shevchenko said combines transaction-monitoring data, outside researchers and input from large centralized players to spot suspicious flows. When it ties a trade to a hack, the protocol either declines to quote it or halts it if execution has already begun.
“Permissionless doesn’t mean neutral,” Shevchenko wrote in his post. “The people who build these systems make choices about what those protocols enable. Refusing to help launder stolen assets is one of ours.”
NEAR Intents also said it would give up its share of the bounty Bitget has offered for frozen funds, so the exchange can recover more.
A Different Answer From THORChain
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen thanked the NEAR Intents team on Monday. “A public chain doesn’t have to choose between being open and excluding hackers, you can build the risk detection in and still let anyone use the chain,” she wrote.
THORChain, another cross-chain protocol, has taken the opposite position. On Monday it again turned down Bitget’s request to block the attacker’s addresses, saying it “doesn’t censor by design.”
Not everyone welcomed NEAR’s approach. A pseudonymous X user, loracle, argued that NEAR runs on a trusted execution environment its team controls, and that it can “seize funds just like a CEX” and request KYC at its discretion.
Bitget has said attackers took about $387.5 million on Sept. 24 after compromising a backend system in its wallet infrastructure. The exchange says its User Protection Fund covers the full loss.
Related Listen: Uneasy Money: How the Resolv Hack Shows an Audit Doesn’t Mean ‘Secure’
