NEAR rises nearly 80% as Intents volume reaches $29.3B

Near Protocol's native token rose nearly 80% over the past week, outperforming the wider cryptocurrency market as the network expanded privacy-focused trading services. On Monday, NEAR traded around $4.29, up about 78.2% over seven days and 22% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization rose about 6% over the same seven-day period. On Thursday, Near Protocol said deposits and withdrawals for perpetual futures trading through near.com were confidential by default. Near said the feature obscures the link between a trader's funding wallet and a dedicated Hyperliquid trading account. Near also said confidential total value locked on near.com had exceeded $70 million on Thursday. That triggered the first snapshot under the NEAR@3.33 incentive program. The program allocated 333,333 milestone tokens for the first distribution. Under the program's rules, the tokens unlock and convert to NEAR when its three-day volume-weighted average price reaches at least $3.33. NEAR Intents allows users to request cross-chain swaps, with market makers competing to execute them. The NEAR Intents Explorer showed about $29.3 billion in cumulative volume and $842 million in volume over the preceding seven days on Monday. Privacy-focused Zcash wallet ZODL was the third-largest referral source by volume over the preceding 24 hours, generating about $3.8 million across 458 transactions. A swap involving roughly $613,000 worth of ZEC was among the largest transactions displayed by the explorer during that period. Bitwise research analyst Camran Khosravi said Near and Zcash are complements. He argued that Near gives ZEC holders confidential cross-chain infrastructure and access to liquidity. Khosravi also cautioned that NEAR Intents' TVL can rise when the price of ZEC already held within the system increases, even without new deposits. Near has extended its privacy focus beyond trading. In July, NEAR AI introduced staking-based payments that let users stake NEAR for credits covering confidential AI inference and agent hosting while retaining ownership of the underlying tokens.