Why Every Chain, Wallet & App Is Integrating NEAR Intents | Kendall Cole

NEAR Intents is the cross-chain infrastructure built by Proximity Labs as a core contributor to the NEAR ecosystem. It currently connects 35 different chains, with new ones added weekly, and reaching that state required years of engineering from the NEAR Intents core team and the bridge team from NEAR One. The system launched as a purely B2B product with no front-end, serving wallets and aggregators including Trust Wallet, Ledger, and LiFi. Most volume still originates from these B2B-to-consumer partners rather than from the direct consumer product. Near.com launched earlier this year as the end-user layer, designed to give global users access to cryptocurrencies, real assets, stablecoins, and integrations like Hyperliquid while hiding all underlying blockchain complexity. Gas fees are fully abstracted inside near.com, only appearing explicitly when depositing from an external chain.

The architectural ambition goes beyond swaps. A NEAR account can custody assets on any chain and interact with any protocol on any chain, with NEAR chain signatures allowing a single account to sign transactions across chains using both ECDSA and EDDSA schemes, which Cole says covers virtually all chains currently in existence. Post-quantum signature schemes would require additional support if they emerged. Cole frames the goal as making users forget they are on a chain at all, targeting a Robinhood-like brokerage experience and what he calls a stateless financial system giving anyone frictionless access to all financial assets. The original super-app thesis held by layer ones like Ethereum has fragmented, and Cole argues that thesis is now potentially being expressed through near.com powered by NEAR Intents.

On asset expansion, meme coins increased the number of on-chain assets by an order of magnitude but created no meaningful integration demand. Tokenized real-world assets represent a far greater opportunity. Robinhood chain launched with roughly 30 tokenized stock assets including Nvidia, Tesla, Micron, and AMD, with between 400 dollars and one million dollars of liquidity on day one, and Cole predicts Robinhood chain tokenized stock support on NEAR Intents is only a matter of time given clear user demand. Polymarket and Kalshi have created entirely new asset classes Cole considers relevant to the system. Cole predicts at least a dozen distinct blockchain ecosystems will become deeply entrenched rather than extreme fragmentation into a billion L2s, with Solana, Ethereum, and Tron each having already established sticky demand in their respective niches.

The MiCA deadline of July 1st created a structural opening for NEAR Intents in Europe. Only 210 of roughly 3,000 crypto firms operating in Europe received MiCA authorization by that date, approximately 7 percent. Binance failed to secure its MiCA license, and Bybit, while holding a MiCA-registered entity, had to migrate users and cannot offer perpetual swaps under that entity. Cole says the combined disruption pushed EU users toward on-chain alternatives. NEAR Intents core protocol is non-custodial and MiCA does not directly apply to it, though integrators must conduct their own legal analysis around key management. Cole argues that thin on-ramps focused on a single function carve out a faster path to MiCA compliance, citing Minarium, which issues the regulated euro stablecoin yourE one-to-one via SEPA Instant with no fees. Once users are on-chain through a compliant on-ramp, on-chain decentralized protocols are permissionless and not bound by nation-state borders. Europeans holding only dollars face genuine currency risk when taxes and expenses are denominated in euros, which Cole says makes a digital euro practically useful rather than redundant.

On July 7th, broad support for confidential intents was pushed to NEAR Intents partners after being available on near.com for several months. The system runs on a dedicated shard within NEAR's sharded architecture, operated by a subset of validators inside a trusted execution environment. Validators cannot view user balances or transactions by default, and de-anonymization requires either a supermajority of validators, typically in response to a court order, or a user-created viewing key. Cole describes this as the broadest privacy product by number of assets and chains currently in the space. Enterprise demand is now a larger driver of feature requests than retail demand, because on-chain activity exposes sensitive commercial information to competitors. The Zcash community provided significant early traction, and with confidential intents a USDC-on-Solana-to-Zcash swap can now be shielded before leaving Solana, extending privacy across the full path rather than only within the Zcash hub.

NEAR Intents takes approximately 10 to 20 basis points per swap depending on the integration partner, with fees flowing into NEAR House of Stake, which has been using a significant portion to buy back NEAR tokens. Near.com charges its own separate fee on top of the protocol fee. Volume is the stated North Star metric. AI agents are identified as an emerging and growing category of traders expected to drive new asset types through the system, and integrating additional chains and partners with existing order flow are the stated ongoing priorities.