$NEAR Intents is one of the cleaner DeFi revenue stories playing out right now. $34.23M annualized fees $34.24M cumulative gross protocol revenue, with 100% directed into $NEAR buybacks. 30d fees sitting around $2.75M. Dynamic resharding (v2.13) is scheduled to drop this month: automatic shard splitting as demand grows post-quantum-safe signing built in. True self-scaling infrastructure. with that Grayscale amended their NEAR ETF S-1 filing on June 12. also near recently announced @3.33 milestone incentive program for confidential Intents users, $70M TVL trigger unlocks milestone tokens convertible 1:1 to $NEAR at $3.33 sustained price. privacy aligned incentives. its positioning as settlement execution layer for AI agents and cross-chain flows while generating protocol-owned revenue, compounding on solid infra upgrades.

the interesting part of confidential swaps on $NEAR isn't that they exist. it's that they're opt-in, and roughly half the near.com volume flips them on anyway. nobody's forced to hide. given the toggle, regular users choose privacy about half the time. "privacy is a niche feature for criminals" is a take that's never met a real user.

Mert has told Illia - publicly, more than once - to stop talking about AI and focus on trading. This week on The Chopping Block, the same Mert: IronClaw is "actually a pretty good example" of crypto x AI. The reviews that count come from people who didn't plan on writing them.

during the drift exploit, Mert was in Illia's DMs: "shut it down." solana's loudest infra voice, asking NEAR's founder to freeze the exits. because stolen funds from every chain now try to leave through intents - it's the deepest cross-chain liquidity there is. Illia's version, told on chopping block: all of april was one rolling war room. who got hacked, which chain, freeze what. so now they're building detection straight into the rails - the kind that flags an empty-yesterday address landing millions today, mid-swap, before settlement. in his essay he calls it SHIELD. thieves pick the deepest liquidity. that's the compliment.

april was the worst month ever for DeFi exploits: $600M stolen, a new hack almost every day, TVL still way down. the embarrassing part: nothing watches for this across chains in real time. stolen funds move, compromised addresses keep interacting, teams piece it together hours later. in his new essay illia lays out what's already in the works on $NEAR: SHIELD on intents - address and transaction level monitoring across networks. it flags funds that touched compromised addresses, catches outlier withdrawals, and can slow or pause a suspicious flow to contain the exposure. his point, not mine: you'd expect this to already exist in DeFi. it doesn't.

$HYPE settled the argument: the only valuation model CT respects is "do the fees buy the token." $1.3B in fees, 97% into buybacks, billions made buying its own token. $NEAR runs the same loop - intents fees buy $NEAR off the market. smaller scale, same shape. this week the two loops touched: hyperliquid perps went live on near.com. any asset from 35 chains in, auto-swapped to USDC through intents, 50 markets at 40x out. every deposit routed this way generates the fees that buy $NEAR. native confidential perps next. perps did $61 trillion last year. same loop, the pipe just got that wide.

"nobody actually uses crypto" is still the default take outside the bubble. meanwhile $NEAR intents cleared $20B from half a million monthly users paying real fees with zero incentives. no points, no airdrop, nothing to farm. they're not early adopters. they're customers.

$NEAR just put a public price target on its own token. $3.33. written directly into the new incentive program: 333,333 locked tokens that only convert when the VWAP holds $3.33 for three straight days. foundations spend entire cycles pretending price doesn't exist. this one made it a milestone with a number on it. either the most degen thing a protocol has ever done, or the most honest. probably both.

funny how the bridge wars ended: nobody won. the category lost. across runs on intents. uniswap shipped uniswapX on intents. cow runs on solvers. even the ethereum foundation launched an open framework around the standard. $NEAR built its own intent layer settling across 35 chains, bitcoin included, $20B through it already. the industry spent years arguing whose bridge was safest. the answer was no bridge.

near(dot)com gave users one toggle: make this swap confidential. no manifesto, no privacy lecture. just a switch. close to half the swap volume flipped it. nobody wakes up wanting zero-knowledge anything. people don't buy privacy, they buy products that happen to be private. they just want to trade without broadcasting their whole book to the chain. $NEAR didn't sell privacy. it sold a better swap.

most L1s monetize one thing: blockspace. $NEAR gets paid at every layer of its stack. > intents settlement - fees on $20B cumulative cross-chain volume, routed into buybacks > NEAR AI cloud - confidential inference, billed like compute > ironclaw - secure agent runtime, agents hosted in hardware enclaves on the same cloud > the chain itself - gas under all of it illia said it plainly: the token is paid everywhere across the stack. four revenue surfaces. $2.5B mcap, ~99% circulating, no vesting cliffs left. blockspace was chapter one.

Hyperliquid has the deepest order book in onchain perps. it's also fully transparent - your positions and liq levels are public. great for some. not for everyone. near(dot)com funds it from 35 chains, auto-swaps to usdc, one account. confidential perps next. you will finally pick what the market sees.

Sui shipped confidential swaps. on one chain. in beta. $NEAR's had it across 35 chains, on mainnet, for months. ~40% of volume already private. cute though.

And if you'd like to use it today on mainnet, visit near.com

the whole market's red and NEAR Intents is having its busiest week of the year - #1 in cross-chain bridges on DeFiLlama by fees and revenue this week. $224m in volume in a single day. $550k in fees over the week, $150k of it kept as revenue. volatility moves money across chains, all of it runs through Intents, and those fees buy back $NEAR. price goes where it goes. the rails don't stop printing.

$NEAR does $50M in real volume every single day, and all of it is organic. no airdrop, no points, no emissions - 550k people paid fees last month just because it works. real demand is the rarest thing in crypto. NEAR has it.