Daily Crypto Roundup: Bitcoin Rebounds, NEAR Freezes Bitget Funds & Wall Street Moves Deeper Into Crypto

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Roundup. A crypto swap service says it identified more than $50 million in attempted transfers tied to the Bitget attacker, but froze only about $503,000.

That gap is today's central story. It asks whether a cross-chain system can be permissionless and still reject stolen money.

But there is an extraordinary twist to the NEAR story today as well. On the very same day its infrastructure is being tested by one of the biggest exchange hacks of the year, the first United States spot near exchange traded product has started trading, complete with staking rewards. We also have Bitcoin responding to weak United States data while potentially breaking a market pattern that has lasted more than a decade. AAVE surging on speculation around a possible token burn. Coinbase completing something no ordinary crypto exchange has historically been able to do in the United States. MoonPay launching in South Korea. Citi expanding tokenized deposits. Korean shares moving toward on-chain distribution. One company approaching ownership of 5% of the entire Ethereum supply. Goldman Sachs plugging one of its biggest treasury funds into crypto infrastructure. And blockchain.com reportedly preparing another major crypto IPO.

At the time of recording, Bitcoin is around $83,818.

Up approximately 1% over 24 hours, after trading between about $82,796 and $84,486.

Ethereum is near $2,714 and higher by roughly 1.7%.

XRP is close to $1.55 after gaining about 4%, while BNB is around $764 and Solana is near $120.37.

Hyperliquid is close to $87.57, Cardano is around $0.25, and Chainlink is near $15.11.

AAVE is the standout among widely traded assets, near $174 and up almost 20%.

We now have a possible explanation for at least part of that move. AAVE founder Stani Kulachov has discussed the possibility of a token burn mechanism being included in the coming Avanomics upgrade, and traders appear to be front-running that possibility. The important word there is possibility. A burn has not suddenly been executed today, and the exact design has not been finalized. But if AAVE were to use protocol economics to remove AAVE from circulation, the market immediately starts trying to calculate what that does to long-term token supply. That appears to be helping drive the speculation. Tell us where you would draw the line between open access and stopping stolen funds. New Kraken users who sign up using our link in the description can claim 20 XRP from Crypto News Today.

Availability and eligibility vary by region. The 20 XRP is supplied by Crypto News Today, not Kraken. Using our link supports the show and helps keep the podcast free from outside advertising. If you already use Kraken, please leave Crypto News Today a 5-star rating on Spotify and add your view in the comments. This is not financial advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. The lead story is the first detailed accounting of how NEAR Intents responded when funds linked to Bitget's $388 million theft reached its cross-chain swap service. General Manager Alex Shevchenko said the attacker attempted more than $50 million of transfers through the system. That number is not the amount recovered. Duplicate attempts were removed. Rejected funds often moved to other providers, and the estimate could differ from the true figure by roughly 10%.

The amount actually frozen was about $503,000.

Approximately $166,000 passed through. NEAR Intents is holding the intercepted balance while Bitget, law enforcement and legal representatives work through recovery.

Its shield system checks transactions against know-your-transaction data, outside intelligence, research and reports from industry participants. It can delay or reject a swap using NEAR Intents. It cannot freeze every wallet on the NEAR blockchain or prevent a rejected user from trying another route. That distinction matters because NEAR Intents describes its infrastructure as permissionless. Critics argue that a service choosing which swaps to process is not neutral. NEAR co-founder Ilya Polosukin's position is that permissionless ownership and transfers do not require every application or liquidity provider built on the network to accept every transaction. The alternative is visible in ThorChain, which rejected Bitget's request to block attacker addresses.

A separate analysis found approximately $6.3 million of completed Ether-to-Bitcoin swaps through that network from one linked wallet. The two systems are not making the same promise. ThorChain protects open routing even when the source is disputed.

NEAR Intents permits open access until its screening system objects. Ordinary users benefit if stolen funds are harder to liquidate and recovered balances return to victims. They lose if inaccurate screening blocks legitimate transactions, and no transparent appeal exists. Shevchenko's report did not identify who can authorize a release or how a wrongly flagged user can recover money. The intervention succeeds if Bitget verifies the claim. The $503,000 returns through a documented legal process, and positives can be appealed. It fails if the attacker simply routes every rejected dollar elsewhere while legitimate users carry the compliance burden. Would you call that a useful security boundary, or a centralized gate wearing a permissionless label? Watch the recovery transaction, an independent accounting of the attempted flows and a published appeals process. And now comes the strange contrast. While NEAR's permissionless credentials are being debated, Bitwise has launched the Bitwise NEAR ETF, ticker NRR, on NYSE Arca. It is the first United States spot exchange traded product providing direct exposure to NEAR. The management fee is 0.75 percent, and Bitwise intends to stake the NEAR held by the fund itself, with those staking rewards feeding into the fund's net asset value.