NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service on the NEAR blockchain, intercepted the majority of funds linked to the recent Bitget breach, raising questions about how “permissionless” the platform truly is.

Bitget breach and attempted transfers

The Bitget exchange reported a breach on September 24 that allowed attackers to siphon roughly $388 million. Within days, the perpetrators tried to move more than $50 million through various cross-chain services, including NEAR Intents.

NEAR Intents’ SHIELD response

According to the platform’s general manager, Alex Shevchenko, NEAR Intents’ automated SHIELD module identified suspicious patterns and froze $503,000 of the attempted swaps. An additional $166,000 managed to complete the transaction before being redirected to other providers. The service processes over $100 million in daily cross-chain volume, but the SHIELD system intervened because the flow deviated from normal activity and matched intelligence from Know-Your-Transaction (KYT) providers and other industry sources.

The permissionless controversy

NEAR Intents markets itself as an open, uncensorable infrastructure where users can swap assets without seeking approval. The recent freeze, however, has led observers to question whether a platform that can hold funds still fits that description. Technical writer Vini Barbosa noted that true permissionlessness implies neutrality and warned that selective blocking could affect users fleeing repression. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin responded that permissionlessness applies to ownership and contract deployment on the underlying blockchain, not to every application built atop it.

Comparison with THORChain’s approach

Unlike NEAR Intents, THORChain has publicly declined to block attacker addresses, arguing that its emergency shutdown controls protect the protocol without targeting specific users. This contrast highlights differing philosophies within the decentralized finance ecosystem regarding how to handle illicit flows.

Open questions and next steps

NEAR Intents has placed the seized assets on hold pending legal and recovery procedures, but it has not clarified who can authorize their release or how mistakenly flagged users might reclaim funds. The platform has offered a bounty waiver for Bitget to engage through law-enforcement channels, yet the lack of transparent governance mechanisms remains a point of criticism.

Why it matters

The incident underscores a growing tension between the ideal of unrestricted, permissionless finance and the practical need to curb money-laundering and theft. How decentralized swap services balance these competing demands could shape regulatory expectations and user trust across the broader DeFi landscape.