$388 Million Hack Sparks Debate Over Screening in Permissionless Cross-Chain Swaps

The recent hack on Bitget drained $388 million from the exchange, and the stolen funds had to be moved before they could be spent. Cross-chain swap services are often used for this purpose, and two of them handled funds from the same theft in the same week but responded differently.

$NEAR Intents, a swap service that routes exchanges between blockchains through a network of solvers, blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the theft. However, THORChain, the largest decentralized swap network, processed about $6.3 million in ether-to-bitcoin swaps from a wallet tied to the attack and declined Bitget's request to block the addresses involved.

The screening system behind the block, SHIELD, froze about $503,000 mid-transaction, and roughly $166,000 passed through before detection caught up. The $50 million counts refused transfer attempts with duplicates removed, carrying an error margin of around 10%.

Permissionless infrastructure provider $NEAR markets itself as open and uncensorable, but its willingness to freeze funds halfway through a swap blurs the line between permissioned and permissionless services.