NEAR Could Be the “Privacy Rail” Powering Zcash’s Next Boom, Says Arthur Hayes

Arthur Hayes said Near Protocol’s NEAR token could benefit from becoming a privacy execution layer for Zcash, arguing that NEAR Intents can move assets across chains without exposing transaction links or forcing users through fragmented bridges.

The thesis is based on infrastructure and price momentum. NEAR Intents lets solvers compete to fill cross-chain orders, including swaps, bridges and AI-agent settlement tasks, while Confidential Intents adds restricted visibility over order size, token pair, direction and timing.

Speaking on The Rollup podcast, Hayes’ view is that this makes NEAR a cleaner way to express the privacy-coin trade than ZEC alone. He called NEAR, ZEC and Hyperliquid’s HYPE his current “holy trinity,” with the brief citing a 20x upside claim for NEAR.

I can now send any crypto asset I want to anyone across the internet in an anonymous way from shielded Zcash using Near Intents. “I think NEAR has a 20x potential, where you know Zcash might have a 5x potential over the next year.

Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder.

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Privacy Rail Thesis

NEAR’s own Confidential Intents page describes the product as cross-chain execution that is confidential by default. It says the system uses a NEAR private shard connected to mainnet through a TEE-based bridge, giving users a confidential execution environment without requiring a bespoke wallet setup for every chain.

Zcash itself already supports transparent and shielded addresses. Shielded transactions hide sender, receiver and amount while still proving that no new coins are created, but cross-chain use has historically added friction and metadata leakage.

NEAR’s role is to reduce that friction. Instead of forcing users to manage separate bridge steps, wallets and settlement paths, the intent layer can route execution through competing solvers while keeping sensitive trade details away from public mempools.

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