After years in the margins, privacy is roaring back into the spotlight and Zcash (ZEC) is leading the charge. Once sidelined by liquidity droughts and compliance overhang, ZEC has been one of the top gainers this month as investors piled into assets tied to self-custody and transactional privacy.
But beneath the surface of ZEC's success lies a different story. While ZEC attracts the headlines, NEAR Protocol is quietly powering the bulk of its onchain activity. Over the past few weeks, most of the shielded ZEC transactions – the private transfers that define ZEC’s unique value proposition – have been processed through NEAR Intents, NEAR’s cross-chain execution layer.
As investors catch up to that structural link, NEAR’s token followed suit, rallying about 40% last week with most of the move concentrated on 7 Nov, as liquidity and volumes surged across the board before this week's market correction. Spot daily volumes surged from roughly $35 million in early November to over $656 million, the highest since March 2024, while perpetual futures ballooned from $158 million to $1.3 billion, driving a 32% single-day gain. The market is beginning to price in NEAR’s growing role as the infrastructure layer for private and autonomous transactions across blockchains.
The hidden engine powering the privacy boom
NEAR is a scalable layer-1 blockchain designed to make Web3 feel invisible. Built around ease of use, speed, and scalability, its core mission is to abstract blockchain complexity and friction so that users and developers interact with outcomes, not infrastructure. What began as an effort to solve a user-experience bottleneck has quickly evolved into a coordination layer for the broader crypto stack. NEAR has become a foundation for interoperability, whereby otherwise siloed blockchains are connected through assets and data flows and the same execution process can be applied to multiple chains.
NEAR’s design philosophy is now extending beyond its own ecosystem, powering cross-chain flows and intelligent on-chain applications. It’s quietly positioning itself as the coordination fabric for AI-native and privacy-preserving systems. Its architecture provides building blocks for autonomous agents, which are applications that can process context, make decisions, and act on-chain with limited human intervention, while enabling encryption and confidentiality.
If NEAR is the operating system, NEAR Intents is the interface layer acting as the connective tissue between chains, abstracting the users’ need to manage separate wallets or navigate complex bridging steps. Launched in November 2024, NEAR Intents is a goal-based transaction framework allowing users or AI agents to express what they want to achieve rather than how to do it.
Over the past six months, activity on NEAR Intents steadily grew, culminating into a record $1.07 billion worth of trades last week. This surge pushed the protocol into the top 10 DEXs by weekly processed volume for the first time.
Once an “intent” is expressed, a network of independent solvers races to deliver the fastest and most cost-effective outcome. The NEAR Intents framework then orchestrates the entire process in the background from routing to settlement, streamlining execution, and reducing the overhead that typically leads to failed transactions.
In other words, single-chain applications can access assets and liquidity from other networks without relying on bridges or wrapped tokens. Imagine swapping USDT from Base to ETH on Solana, staking NEAR tokens on Near, or sending shielded funds through ZEC’s privacy layer, all by simply typing the intent, rather than executing every step manually.
That’s what makes NEAR’s stack stand out: a foundation that’s now powering real products like Zashi wallet, where private settlement meets cross-chain coordination.
Zashi Integration: a liquidity hub for ZEC
Introduced on 1 Oct, Zashi 2.4 integrated NEAR Intents, enabling seamless shielded Zcash (ZEC) transactions and cross-chain flows. Looking closer, NEAR acts as the execution layer behind Zcash’s private settlement system bridging the gap between transparent and shielded ecosystems. Thanks to this integration, Zashi now allows users to tap into Zcash’s privacy features by moving liquidity from major assets from any blockchain, back-and-forth directly into Zcash’s shielded pools without exposing every transaction step onchain.
Over Zashi’s first month of operation, NEAR Intents has processed hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions on the ZEC chain. Over that same period, Zashi accounted for about $340 million in swap volume, according to onchain data and reports from Josh Swihart, CEO of Electronic Coin Company and founder of Zashi.
Cumulative trading volumes have now reached roughly $5 billion since the product’s release last year, marking a significant acceleration since the October integration with Zashi. Within this activity, Zcash (ZEC) has emerged as a key contributor to total NEAR Intents volume over the last 30 days, representing in average 15% of the overall daily volume processed.
In practical terms, the vast majority of ZEC volume processes through NEAR Intents originate from Zashi in just a few weeks after launch. Most shielded ZEC liquidity is now settling through NEAR’s execution layer, consolidating the protocol’s position as the main liquidity venue for private cross-chain flows.
As trading volumes climbed, protocol fees followed suit, with NEAR Intents now accounting for more than 97% of all fees generated on the NEAR network, up from just 34% six months ago. Cumulative fees collected by NEAR Intents have reached $9.2 million, representing a 55-fold increase over six months, while total network fees stand at $10.7 million for the same period. According to Illia Polosukhin, NEAR’s co-founder, these fees are earmarked for market buybacks, embedding a direct value-accrual mechanism at the protocol level, but the flywheel is yet to be activated.
Structural tailwinds
New structural forces are beginning to shape NEAR’s trajectory. Backed by OceanPal, a publicly traded investment vehicle focused on Digital Assets and AI infrastructure, SovereignAI (SVRN AI), is building a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) to accumulate NEAR tokens from the open market. Back in October, OceanPal raised $120 million to capitalize the initiative, positioning NEAR at the center of its treasury strategy. Unlike passive investment models that merely capture increases in value, OceanPal reinvests capital in the ecosystem to support development and adoption.
Meanwhile, NEAR’s governance layer is tightening fundamentals. In October, the NEAR community approved a proposal to halve network inflation from 5% to 2.5%, reducing future token emissions. Much like Bitcoin’s halving, which periodically cuts block rewards to preserve scarcity and strengthen long-term incentives, NEAR’s adjustment realigns the balance between network growth and validator rewards. The maturing economic design implies further sustained value as activity scales.
You must be logged in to post a comment.