A few weeks ago I made a post on here talking about how a regular Zcash user got a significant amount of funds frozen by Near Intents. This has still not been resolved. This individual, who has a thoroughly documented experience dealing with Near Intents arbitrarily locking his funds, is unable to do anything and will possibly have to pursue legal action.
Well things keep getting worse for Near Intents, who is assuredly not at all the permissionless, decentralized, and trustless service they had previously claimed to be. In a blog post published by Alex Shevchenko, the founder of Near Intents brags about how stolen funds in the recent Bitget exploit were blocked by their SHIELD protocol.
On 24th of September @bitget was hacked. Approximately $387.5M of the funds were stolen. A significant part of these funds moved across chains, mainly into Ethereum. Hackers attempted to move through NEAR Intents more than $50M, yet only $166k passed and $503k were stopped during the execution.
NEAR Intents routinely processes $100M+ of a crosschain trading volume in a day. Yet in this case, only a negligible fraction of the hacked funds were flowing through us. The reason for this behaviour is SHIELD.
SHIELD is our risk-intelligence layer protecting NEAR Intents. It automatically detects deviations in flows, collects numerous inputs from KYT and intelligence providers, independent researches, companies and largest centralised players in the industry. Based on these signals the protocol can decide how to handle a transaction.
Within the Bitget hack, SHIELD detected $50M+ of the attempted laundering flows (duplicates filtered; these later went to other providers), with $166k unfortunately going through. It also froze $503k of the hacked funds in the middle of execution. The funds remain restricted pending the appropriate legal and recovery process.
So despite branding themselves as decentralized finance, they are openly collaborating with Chain Analysis? But wait, it gets worse, because when attempting to explain the rationale behind blocking certain transactions, Shevchenko pens this beauty:
We believe in building decentralised and permissionless systems. But permissionless doesn't mean neutral. The people who build these systems make choices about what those protocols enable. Refusing to help launder stolen assets is one of ours.
Lol. It figures that the swap service that Zcash has attached themselves to is also openly censoring transactions, and somehow writing that "permissionless doesn't mean neutral" without understanding how completely asinine that statement is. People who support projects like this don't realize that if they will censor alleged north korean hackers, they will censor you. Near Intents is only a small step away from having full on KYC, and they will comply the second they are asked to.