NEAR Reprices as Intents Flywheel Kicks In

Over the past week, market news pushed participants to bid NEAR, which ran as high as 43% from its $1.02 opening price. The asset outperformed the broader altcoin complex by an order of magnitude before meeting resistance at $1.45.

Volume fuels momentum

The move was supported by significant liquidity. From the day of the release, spot trading volume surged from $44.6mn to $269.5mn, representing a sixfold increase. Futures volume followed suit, climbing from $191.8mn to $829.7mn over the same period.

(Source: Trading View)

NEAR Intents structural resilience  

NEAR Intents has been the protocol's primary revenue engine since its integration in Q1 2025. The system has consistently generated more than 95% of total NEAR protocol fees since November 2025.

Rather than routing users through a fixed liquidity pool or bridge, Intents works on an instruction model. The user specifies the expected outcome, and the system determines how to achieve it, essentially abstracting blockchain complexity.

That instruction, or "intent", is picked up by a network of independent solvers competing in real time on price and speed to fill the order across the involved chains. The winning solver executes the trade while a settlement layer verifies delivery before funds clear. A small fee is extracted at the final step, which is individually negligible but compounds into the protocol's main revenue line at scale.

The winning solver executes the trade, while a settlement layer verifies delivery before funds clear. A small fee is extracted at that final step; while individually negligible, at scale, it compounds into the protocol's main revenue line.

(Source: NEAR's Dune Dashboard)

Through 2026 year-to-date, Intents has processed $5.2bn in additional volume, pushing cumulative throughput above the $15bn threshold. This represents a 59% increase from the start of the year, accrued quietly against a backdrop of broad market weakness. The protocol's peak single-day print was $200.7mn during the 5 Feb market crash, which was essentially neck-and-neck with the highest daily volumes seen during the privacy token frenzy of the prior quarter.

Shifting volume composition

Chain volume composition tells a story of its own. During the height of the privacy narrative in Q4 2025, Zcash (ZEC) captured roughly 20% of NEAR Intents volume, while Ethereum (ETH) accounted for approximately half of the traded volume alongside Bitcoin (BTC). That picture has normalized; ZEC has covered only 7% of the volume since the beginning of the year.

NEAR’s own layer-1 (L1) accounts for just 3.0% of total throughput. This counterintuitive figure reflects the network's actual utility; NEAR Intents serves as a cross-chain settlement and execution layer, while the NEAR L1 acts as the back-end infrastructure rather than the final destination.

On asset volume composition, 75% of all transfers run through stablecoins, with Tether (USDT) representing roughly two-thirds of that and USD Coin (USDC) the remainder. BTC follows in third place. Together, stablecoins and BTC account for approximately 85% of total transaction volume on the protocol. This pattern is consistent with NEAR Intents being used primarily for cross-chain settlement and capital movement rather than speculative trading.

NEAR's revenue picture 

NEAR’s fee trajectory over the past six months is one of the more significant data points in L1 analytics. Year-to-date, the protocol has generated $10.3mn in revenue. This puts it squarely on pace to match the $15.1mn generated in Q4 2025, which was the highest-activity quarter in the network's history. Since Oct 2025, the protocol has generated approximately $25.5mn in total fees.

As activity and traded volume held through the market drawdown, revenues remained stable as well. This serves as a signal that the protocol has crossed a threshold where onchain activity is driven by genuine demand rather than transient speculation.

(Source: Token Terminal)

With an average of $162,313 in daily fees generated year-to-date, the annualized run-rate reaches $60.6mn. The market has slowly started to internalize this figure, which becomes more meaningful when compared with other L1 networks.

At a fees-to-FDV ratio of 3.5%, NEAR ranks first among the largest L1 networks. This puts the protocol ahead of Hyperliquid (2.5%), Solana (0.6%), BNB Chain (0.2%), and Ethereum (0.1%). Relative to the economic activity it is already generating, NEAR’s current valuation reflects a significant discount in its revenue-generating capacity compared with its peers.

The fee switch 

The fee switch, which went live on 23 Feb, is the mechanism that closes the loop between protocol usage and token value. From that date forward, 50% of all fees collected through the NEAR Intents route back to the ecosystem via buybacks and staking distributions denominated in NEAR tokens. The remaining 50% is allocated to solver operators and distribution partners.

With the fee switch now active and the annualized revenue run-rate at $60.6mn, the protocol's 50% share translates to approximately $30mn per year flowing back to token holders and the ecosystem treasury. These funds are available for further buybacks, buyback-and-earn programs, or governance-directed deployment.

NEAR's annual token emissions, following the protocol's inflation halving from 5% to 2.5% in Oct 2025, now stand at roughly $40mn per year at current valuations. The fee switch's $30mn annual contribution nearly offsets that figure entirely. This represents a meaningful shift in the supply and demand calculus for the token. If volume continues to grow, the protocol could reach net-deflationary territory on a fee-adjusted basis within 2026.

Confidential Intents

Privacy in cryptocurrency has a structural problem that goes beyond regulation: it has always been siloed. Privacy chains such as Monero (XMR) and ZEC operate within their own isolated ecosystems. Even sophisticated protocols plugging into Ethereum like Railgun, which benefit from deep liquidity, cannot easily reach Bitcoin, Tron or other networks in a single, private execution environment.

Confidential Intents change that framing. Rather than building another privacy chain or wrapping existing infrastructure, NEAR treats confidentiality as a feature layer on top of its existing cross-chain execution stack. This result does not map neatly onto any existing privacy product category. By treating privacy as a service rather than a destination, the protocol allows for private execution across multiple chains without requiring users to exit their preferred ecosystems.

The confidentiality layer runs on a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) bridge, which is a segregated NEAR execution environment. This space is walled off from the public chain and linked back to the mainnet through hardware-level encryption. Transactions that move through it, including deposits, transfers, and withdrawals, never touch the public mempool. Funds move freely between a user's private and standard accounts, or out to any connected network, at any time.

The decision to skip zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs is deliberate. ZK-based privacy systems place the cryptographic burden on the user's device, which can be slow to generate and requires dedicated tooling. NEAR's approach pushes that burden into the infrastructure itself, enforcing confidentiality at the hardware enclave level. Privacy is enforced at the moment of execution, allowing the same account to hold both public and private activity toggled as needed.

NEAR's focus on privacy represents an extension of infrastructure built over several years rather than a sudden pivot. By the time Confidential Intents launched, the protocol had already spent months serving as a settlement layer for private transfers of ZEC. Zashi’s $340mn in swap volume in its first month alone ran largely through the NEAR execution stack. The confidentiality layer is the next logical step for the infrastructure that was already in place.