NEAR Unveils Confidential Intents To Enable Privacy-First Execution For Cross-Chain Transactions

Layer 1 blockchain NEAR announced the launch of Confidential Intents, a new feature designed to provide restricted visibility for users managing cross-chain positions. The solution targets a broad spectrum of participants, including institutional investors, enterprises, and advanced decentralized finance (DeFi) users. 

Built on a NEAR private shard, Confidential Intents introduces a confidentiality layer that enables compliance-aware DeFi workflows while maintaining cryptographically secure execution.

While existing zero-knowledge (ZK) privacy systems offer cryptographic confidentiality, they typically support a limited range of operations and require client-side state synchronization. Confidential Intents, in contrast, allows users to toggle between a Main Account and a Confidential Account, enabling privacy on demand across transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, with support for swaps expected in future updates. This approach aims to prevent issues such as miner extractable value (MEV) exploitation, frontrunning, strategy copying, and forced liquidations caused by visible positions.

The feature is designed to accommodate a wide array of privacy-first use cases. For individual DeFi participants, it protects retail traders from sandwich attacks and allows larger holders to move significant positions without signaling intent. Institutions can use Confidential Intents to shield transactions from frontrunning and MEV, maintain confidentiality of positions, and enable selective disclosure with auditable execution. 

Enterprises can leverage the system for confidential payroll, treasury, and supply chain operations, keeping sensitive financial data such as salaries, vendor payments, liquidity positions, and negotiated rates off the public ledger. Developers and applications benefit from confidential asset management across multiple chains, private inputs for sealed-bid mechanisms, and concealed state for inventory or game logic operations.

Confidential Intents To Deliver Institutional-Grade, Compliance-Ready Privacy For Cross-Chain DeFi

Confidential Intents operates on a dedicated NEAR private shard, a separate execution environment maintained by a decentralized set of permissioned validators and connected to the NEAR mainnet via a trusted execution environment (TEE)-based bridge. Transactions initiated through near.com or integrated third-party applications execute within this private shard, ensuring that deposits, transfers, and swaps remain confidential. 

Users retain the ability to move assets between public and confidential accounts or withdraw to external chains, without the need for client-side ZK proof generation, complex wallet configurations, or state synchronization. The system preserves a user experience comparable to standard public transactions while maintaining cryptographic integrity and compliance.

Unlike mixing services or post-hoc anonymization solutions, Confidential Intents integrates privacy directly into the execution layer. It also supports selective disclosure and auditable execution, allowing institutions to meet regulatory requirements without exposing sensitive position data to public networks. 

By providing confidential execution comparable to centralized exchanges, the feature seeks to facilitate institutional-grade transaction flow on DeFi platforms, expanding the potential for on-chain volume while maintaining discretion. This approach positions Confidential Intents as a bridge between fully transparent DeFi ecosystems and fully opaque privacy chains, enabling scalable, secure, and privacy-conscious participation in cross-chain decentralized finance.

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