NEAR Intents Blocks $50 Million in Assets Linked to Bitget Hack
NEAR Intents has intercepted over $50 million in cross-chain transactions linked to the wallets involved in the $387.5 million Bitget exchange hack. According to The Defiant, alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, confirmed on September 29 that the protocol's SHIELD risk-intelligence system identified and halted the suspicious flows before they could be completed through its network of solvers.
The protocol successfully froze approximately $503,000 during execution, though roughly $166,000 managed to pass through.
SHIELD Mechanism and Asset Recovery
The SHIELD system, which screens transactions for suspicious activity prior to swap completion, successfully froze nearly $503,000 during the operation. According to Shevchenko, approximately $166,000 in illicit funds had already passed through the network before the block was enforced. This intervention highlights the role of automated risk-intelligence in cross-chain environments, where assets are often moved rapidly across different blockchains to evade detection.
Investigation and Industry Response
The Bitget hack, which occurred on September 24, has seen its estimated losses rise to $387.5 million as investigators identified additional stolen assets in Zcash and TRON. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has linked the laundering efforts to Chinese illicit actors allegedly working on behalf of North Korean attackers. The investigation revealed that these actors have been openly coordinating on public Discord and Telegram channels, leaving a trail of patterns that investigators are tracking across multiple major exploits, including the $292 million Kelp DAO breach earlier this year.
While Bitget has restored Bitcoin withdrawals following a security review and the patching of the underlying vulnerability, the broader crypto industry remains divided on the role of infrastructure providers in policing transactions. While Bitget CEO Gracy Chen urged services like THORChain to implement selective censorship of identified addresses, THORChain maintained that its network is designed to avoid such measures, focusing instead on protocol-wide security. NEAR Intents, meanwhile, has positioned its SHIELD system as a proactive tool for risk management, with co-founder Illia Polosukhin emphasizing that while the protocol is permissionless, individual liquidity providers and applications retain the ability to filter transactions to prevent the laundering of stolen assets.
According to CCN, bitget laundering accounts overlap with operators behind the $292M Kelp DAO exploit, while post-hack screening models evolved from Chainflip's 2025 Bybit response. According to Unchained, nEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen publicly defended application-level filtering as compatible with permissionless blockchain infrastructure.