Don’t fade NEAR

When price and fundamentals move together, that catches my eye.

NEAR has nearly doubled in a week and is now up 178% since mid-August, helped by confidential perps and a Zcash fueled swap business. The rally looks sudden, but the business underneath it has been changing for much longer.

Underneath the re-rating, REV has regained momentum but under a different business model. Since January 2025, execution fees fell 83%, from $120K a week to $20K. 

However, every dollar of that loss was replaced by NEAR Intents (a transaction type that lets users perform actions across different blockchains without manually managing execution routes or gas fees). Before the fee switch activation in February 2026, NEAR routed Intents volume and captured none of it. Intents now constitute ~85% of NEAR REV and NEAR is up 350% since the activation.

This focus on Intents came at the cost of native activity. Relayer-paid (delegated) transactions were 78% of NEAR's volume in Q1 2026 and had been the bulk of it since 2024. These were gas-subsidized consumer apps, and the subsidy stopped.

The effect can be seen in the fee data. Token burn has fallen from 100K NEAR in January 2025 to 20k NEAR in August 2026. The monthly burn rate now sits at 0.7%, though with an all-time high of 3.4% in March 2024, the burn was insignificant anyway. 

The activity mix for NEAR Intents is mainly deposits, withdrawals and swaps.

But swaps are where the money is made and SwapKit, a cross-chain swap SDK embedded in wallets like Ledger Live, BitPay and Trust Wallet, is the largest channel. 

I did find an area of concern with this setup. SwapKit is 35% of Intents volume but 61% of fees. NEAR cannot see which wallet the flow came from and SwapKit routes NEAR Intents as one of four interchangeable providers alongside THORChain, Maya and Chainflip. So NEAR's position is re-contested on every single quote. We see below that stablecoins, BTC, ETH and ZEC are the vast majority of the flow. So NEAR’s Intent revenue rests on who can provide the best quote, with no visibility into who leaves.

Speaking of no visibility, NEAR is also benefiting from the privacy narrative, so it's worth checking the size of it. Zcash deserves some credit as ZODL (the Zcash wallet) doubled its fee share to 16% in September and ZEC is 9% of Intents volume. But these aren’t dominant shares. Confidential Intents TVL is the one genuinely vertical line, up from $28M in mid-August to $131M since perps launched. However, 50% of it is wrapped NEAR, deposited into a program that pays credits out of staking yield. Essentially, the protocol's own token farming its own emissions. Strip that out and external confidential deposits are roughly $65M.

What about the AI narrative? The AI pivot contributes nothing measurable. NEAR AI Cloud publishes no revenue, customers, or GPU count and no disclosed path to the token. So I can’t say much here. Two years into being an AI company, everything that reaches NEAR holders comes from Intents and most of Intents arrive through SwapKit, which decides on every quote whether NEAR gets the trade, and won't say which wallets are behind it.

However, Intents is a useful product for AI agents simply because it's a useful product. SwapKit’s share continues to fall while volumes continue to rise and confidential TVL is accelerating, regardless of the mix. Meanwhile, most other chains have seen their fees collapse by over 90% and have nothing to replace them with. NEAR built something, turned it on, and it’s working. Don’t fade a project with proven execution, a giga-brain team, and the intent to keep shipping.

— Marc

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