Shevchenko framed the blocked figure against the service’s ordinary business. $NEAR routinely processes more than $100 million in daily volume, he noted, and the refusals were a negligible fraction of it. The screening did not cost the business its flow.
Cross-chain infrastructure has long been treated as structurally unable to stop stolen funds, with no operator to call and no account to freeze. The Bitget flows show the constraint is a choice. A service that takes custody mid-swap, even briefly, can screen at that moment, and whether it does is a business decision rather than a technical limit.
Permissionless, with boundaries
$NEAR markets itself as permissionless, open and uncensorable, and a service that can freeze funds halfway through a swap is doing something most people would call permissioned. Vini Barbosa, a technical writer building at Ramp Labs, wrote on X that permissionless has to mean neutral, and that a rail willing to restrict suspected unlawful users will also restrict people moving money under repressive governments.
Cofounder Illia Polosukhin answered in narrower terms: permissionless means nobody needs permission to own assets, transfer them or deploy contracts. Shevchenko’s phrasing concedes the gap between the two positions. The service will remain “permissionless infrastructure, but with boundaries.”
Institutional users, the buyers every infrastructure provider is now chasing, generally prefer a rail that screens. THORChain argued the other position in public. “A halt is not a selective freeze of specific funds or an individual swap,” the protocol wrote on X. “THORChain is permissionless and doesn’t censor by design.” It asked what responsibility Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB Chain bear when stolen funds move across them, and noted that the addresses that took $10.7 million from its own vaults in May were never blacklisted either. The answer was the same after the $1.5 billion Bybit theft last year.
While champions of decentralization support the decision, key names from the broader industry has pushed back. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, whose request THORChain declined, wrote that decentralization “is a design principle, not a shield for facilitating known stolen funds.” OKX founder Star Xu disputed the Bitcoin comparison from the other direction: THORChain’s validators jointly control the assets in its vaults, which makes the network an intermediary rather than a base layer, and the same node operators halted it for 39 days in May when its own vaults were at stake.
At a third layer sit the stablecoin issuers. Circle and Tether froze about $320,000 in USDC and USDT linked to the Bitget breach, a rounding error against the total loss but a reminder that issuer-level freezing remains the most reliable circuit breaker in crypto, because it operates on the asset rather than the application.
The frozen $503,000 has no owner of record
$NEAR is holding the intercepted $503,000 pending a legal and recovery process, and has waived any recovery bounty Bitget offered. Formal requests route through a Kodex law-enforcement portal, the channel where Bitget or investigators would formally claim the funds. Shevchenko’s report does not name who can authorize a release, and it describes no process for a wrongly flagged user to get money back. The screening that produced the freeze operates on estimates with a stated error margin of 10%.
A screen that halts a legitimate transfer, with no published release authority and no remedy, is a service holding someone’s money on suspicion. The securities and payments industries resolved that problem with defined processes, because holding funds without one is a liability in almost every jurisdiction. Crypto’s screening layer has reached the same point without the process.
The first dispute over the $503,000 will test whether the release of those funds follows a rule anyone can see.
cryptobriefing.com
