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NEAR surged over 50% in a week, what new story is the old public chain telling?

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Leveraging NEAR Intents to enable cross-chain and privacy transactions, integrate with Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, and build settlement infrastructure for AI Agents.

Original Title: "NEAR Surges Over 50% in a Week, How Does the 'Husband Chain' Tell a New Story?"
Original Author: Asher, Odaily Planet Daily

Over the past week, NEAR rose from around $2.3 to a high above $3.9, briefly gaining over 50%, making it one of the strongest-performing and most discussed mainstream altcoins in the community recently.

Unlike past narratives centered on sharding and high-performance public chains, NEAR is this time attempting to tell a new story more closely tied to real transaction demand. From cross-chain to privacy transactions, and further to perpetual contracts and AI Agents, this public chain is trying to simultaneously capture capital and user demand from multiple hot sectors.

Launching an "Options-Style Airdrop": Token Unlocking Tied to Both TVL and Token Price

In June of this year, NEAR launched the NEAR@3.33 milestone incentive program, rewarding users who use the privacy transaction feature on near.com, with the first round prize pool containing 333,333 NEAR tokens, unlockable upon meeting two targets.

Target One: Assets within near.com privacy accounts reach $70 million. On September 17, this metric was officially met, triggering the first snapshot. Accounts that continuously held more than $100 in privacy assets at the time of the snapshot and completed at least one privacy swap are eligible to participate in the reward distribution. Final shares will be calculated based on a combination of fund holding duration, holding amount, and trading activity, with a single wallet receiving at most 2% of the prize pool to avoid excessive concentration of rewards among a few large holders.

Target Two: NEAR's three-day volume-weighted average price exceeds $3.33. After the snapshot is completed, users still receive NEAR@3.33 milestone tokens that cannot be traded or transferred; only when NEAR's three-day volume-weighted average price reaches or exceeds $3.33 will these tokens convert 1:1 into circulating NEAR. Calculated at $3.33, the total value of the first round of rewards is approximately $1.11 million. NEAR has stood above $3.33 for two consecutive days since September 18, and September 20 is the final day of the three-day price assessment. If today's volume-weighted average price remains above $3.33, the unlock conditions will be met.

From a General Public Chain to a "Unified Trading Gateway for All Chains"

NEAR's product positioning has also undergone a significant shift.

In the past, the market's perception of the Near chain was mainly limited to sharding, high TPS, and low Gas fees, but these capabilities struggled to create a clear differentiation from other public chains. Now, NEAR is shifting its development focus to NEAR Intents and near.com, attempting to become a unified trading gateway connecting different blockchains, with its trading scope no longer confined to its own ecosystem.

NEAR Intents is a trading method that "only specifies the outcome, not the execution process." In traditional cross-chain swaps, users need to select a cross-chain bridge themselves, transfer assets to the target chain, prepare the corresponding Gas tokens, and then go to a DEX to complete the trade; in NEAR Intents, users only need to state what they are willing to give and what they wish to receive. For example, after a user submits "exchange ETH on Ethereum for ZEC," the system sends the request to multiple market makers, who compete on quotes based on price, speed, and execution quality. Users do not need to understand which bridges or liquidity pools the transaction passes through, nor do they need to hold the target chain's Gas in advance; as long as the final amount of assets received is not lower than the quote accepted at the time of signing, the transaction can be executed.

NEAR Intents does not only serve near.com; it can also be integrated into other wallets and applications through the 1Click API and trading components. Currently, products such as Ledger, Brave Wallet, Infinex, THORSwap, and HOT Wallet have all adopted its cross-chain trading services, and Stargate has also integrated NEAR Intents into some cross-chain routes. Therefore, some users may use the quotes and settlement services provided by NEAR Intents through other products even without visiting near.com.

Currently, NEAR Intents has connected more than 30 public chains, with cumulative cross-chain transaction volume exceeding $30 billion. Its protocol layer charges a 0.0001% fee per transaction, and wallets and applications integrated with the 1Click API can also set their own platform fees on top of that. From this perspective, NEAR no longer requires all assets and applications to migrate to its own chain, but instead hides in the trading backend to provide routing and settlement services for assets on other chains.

Privacy Transactions Become a New Direction for Differentiation

After NEAR Intents enabled cross-chain transactions, NEAR has further added privacy features to NEAR Intents, launching Confidential Intents, addressing the issue of traditional on-chain transactions exposing order information in advance.

Once ordinary on-chain transactions enter the public mempool, wallet addresses, traded assets, amounts, and timing can all be observed externally. For large transactions, this information may expose users' holdings and trading strategies, and can also easily attract MEV behaviors such as front-running and sandwich attacks. Confidential Intents sends transaction requests to NEAR's private shard, where the quoting and execution process does not appear in the public mempool. This shard also does not provide a public RPC or block explorer, so outsiders cannot directly see what orders users submitted or what quotes different market makers offered. After the transaction is completed, assets are still transferred to the public chain address specified by the user, but it is difficult for outsiders to fully link the deposit address, trading direction, and final receiving address. Users can also proactively generate viewing keys to disclose transaction records to auditors or other designated parties.

ZEC is a typical case of NEAR combining cross-chain transactions with privacy needs. The Zodl wallet has already integrated NEAR Intents, allowing users to directly swap BTC, USDC, or Solana ecosystem assets into ZEC in the privacy pool, without first transferring assets to a centralized exchange and then withdrawing them to a Zcash privacy address. ZEC provides privacy assets and shielded addresses, while NEAR Intents is responsible for aggregating funds from other chains, providing users with a cross-chain channel into the Zcash privacy ecosystem.

Alex Shevchenko, head of NEAR Intents, said,

"Privacy is rapidly becoming a core need for the industry, and NEAR is becoming the infrastructure driving privacy transactions to become the default choice. By combining cross-chain liquidity with capabilities such as anti-front-running and preventing the leakage of trading strategies, institutions and DeFi users can complete large transactions while preserving privacy."

As ZEC trading activity rises, user demand for swaps into Zcash from ecosystems such as BTC, ETH, and Solana may also bring more trading volume and fees to NEAR Intents. NEAR itself is not a privacy coin, but by providing a cross-chain entry point for privacy assets and hiding transaction paths and execution information, it can also be considered a privacy-concept coin.

Integrating Hyperliquid, extending from cross-chain swaps to perpetual contracts

In June of this year, near.com integrated Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, allowing users to directly trade over 50 perpetual contract markets provided by Hyperliquid on near.com, with leverage of up to 40x. On September 17, this feature further added a privacy mode.

Typically, users entering Hyperliquid need to first prepare the supported margin assets and then complete deposits through designated networks. near.com integrates cross-chain deposits into the trading process, allowing users to deposit various assets from over 30 public blockchains. NEAR Intents handles cross-chain swaps in the background, converting them into USDC margin accepted by Hyperliquid and then transferring them to the trading account.

The privacy mode primarily hides the funding path for users entering Hyperliquid. Orders and positions are still recorded on Hyperliquid, but it is harder for outsiders to link the trading account and deposit process to the user's main wallet. Therefore, this feature does not hide the perpetual contracts themselves, but reduces the possibility of tracking the user's funding sources and main wallet.

In this collaboration, Hyperliquid provides the perpetual contract markets, order book, liquidity, and trade execution, while near.com handles account access, cross-chain deposits, and privacy processing. near.com can also charge additional front-end service fees during user trades through Hyperliquid's Builder Code, thereby expanding itself from a cross-chain swap tool to a trading gateway that can continuously earn trading fees. Compared to one-time cross-chain swaps, perpetual contracts have higher trading frequency, which not only increases near.com's potential to continuously collect fees but also extends NEAR's trading gateway from cross-chain swaps further into the derivatives market.

AI Agents Provide Longer-Term Imaginative Space

In addition to cross-chain, privacy, and derivatives trading, NEAR also positions itself as the settlement infrastructure for AI Agents, enabling AI to securely manage assets and independently complete trades, payments, and tool invocations.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin believes,

"Only when Agents are sufficiently secure can the Agent economy truly take shape."

Around this goal, NEAR has already built a set of mutually supporting products. NEAR AI provides private inference capabilities, IronClaw isolates tools and account credentials in a trusted execution environment to prevent private keys and user data from being directly exposed to models; Chain Signatures allow Agents to sign transactions on different blockchains; NEAR Intents handles cross-chain swaps and settlement. After combining these capabilities, Agents can mobilize assets across multiple chains based on user instructions without having to handle cross-chain bridges and Gas one by one.

However, compared with NEAR Intents, which has already generated tens of billions of dollars in trading volume, NEAR's layout in AI Agents is still in its early stages. Whether Agents can form large-scale on-chain payment and trading demand, and whether these activities can ultimately translate into NEAR's protocol revenue, still requires more real data for verification.