NEAR Intents says addresses linked to the Bitget attacker attempted more than $50 million in cross-chain swaps through its service, but that figure should not be confused with money successfully frozen or recovered.
The protocol’s general manager, Alex Shevchenko, reported that its SHIELD monitoring system stopped approximately $503,000 during processing. About $166,000 passed through the service. Most rejected assets were subsequently routed through other providers, according to CoinDesk’s review of the disclosure. coindesk.com
Shevchenko said repeated swap attempts were removed from the calculation and estimated that the totals could vary by roughly 10%. The verified update is therefore a $503,000 restriction against more than $50 million in attempted routing, not a $50 million recovery.
NEAR Intents’ compliance documentation says swap requests can be checked for associations with hacks and other suspicious activity. These controls apply to the routing service. They do not give its operators control over every wallet or transaction on the NEAR blockchain.
The intervention differs from THORChain’s response to the same attacker. THORChain declined Bitget’s request to block identified addresses, while CoinDesk previously traced approximately $6.3 million in completed Ether-to-Bitcoin swaps through that network.
NEAR Intents says the restricted assets will remain held pending legal and recovery proceedings. Its disclosure did not identify who can authorize release of the funds or provide a public process for users who believe they were incorrectly flagged.
TOKEN RECON ASSESSMENT
The development exposes a practical distinction between permissionless settlement infrastructure and a permissioned routing application built on top of it.
SHIELD reduced the amount processed through NEAR Intents, but it did not immobilize the attacker’s rejected assets. The next intelligence point is whether the $503,000 is returned through a documented legal process and whether NEAR Intents publishes transparent appeal, false-positive and authorization procedures.
