Aptos Joins 20 Blockchains With Near Intents; Cross-Chain Volume Approaches $1 Billion

The Aptos network is now part of a growing selection of 20 interconnected blockchains via NEAR Intents, a cross-chain and chain-abstraction protocol powered by NEAR’s infrastructure. NEAR Intents is an open-source framework already adopted by different applications and currently supports over 115 tokens, approaching $1 billion in volume in nearly 2 million cross-chain swaps, running on the NEAR blockchain.

On September 3, the “add Aptos support” pull request was merged into the NEAR Intents, formerly Defuse Protocol, repository on GitHub—based on a Coinspeaker investigation. As documented in the pull request, the code change “enabled Aptos network support across environments, added APT as a supported token in production and staging, and added USDT on Aptos to the supported asset list.” This code had been proposed two months ago, as per open-source development activities.

Pull request: add Aptos support #493, at defuse-protocol/defuse-frontend repository | Source: GitHub

The official announcement came six hours after that, posted by the NEAR Protocol account on X, celebrating the Aptos partnership, together with the Shelby implementation for decentralized AI storage.

$1 Billion of NEAR Intents-Powered Cross-Chain Swaps

As of this writing, NEAR Intents has already processed $955.66 million in 1.98 million swaps across 115 tokens from 20 blockchains. Including Aptos, other networks with live support at app.near-intents.org are Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, BNB Chain, Solana, Dogecoin, Tron, Sui, Stellar, Avalanche, TON, Shiba Inu, NEAR, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Berachain, Gnosis, and Base.

With that, Aptos users can now send and receive transactions from all these networks through NEAR smart contract calls as an intermediary, paying as low as $0.01 in fees at a 1.2-second finality—plus the fees and finality time of each blockchain involved in the operation.

On July 30, on-chain activity suggested Cardano could soon be implemented in NEAR Intents, with Charles Hoskinson saying he was “glad to be working with NEAR.” If Cardano’s integration takes as long as Aptos’s, ADA could be available there by the end of September.

Nearly one-third of NEAR Intents’s all-time volume was achieved in the last 30 days, according to data from its specialized dashboard on Dune, accumulating $302.73 million in the one-month period. With such growth in this short time, the momentum looks favorable for NEAR Intents and blockchains like Aptos becoming part of its ecosystem for intent-based, chain-abstracted interactions.

NEAR Intents dashboard, with data collected on September 3 | Source: Dune

Notably, the NEAR Intents protocol is powering different applications and SDKs like Zashi, ThorSwap, SwapKit, SurgeSwap, OmniBridge, HOT Wallet, Rhea Finance, BitterAI, FractionAI’s recently announced prediction market, and more.

Zashi, for example, added NEAR Intents to power easy on- and off-ramps for Zcash (ZEC), a leading privacy cryptocurrency, as Google searches for “privacy coin” rise. The protocol leverages NEAR’s tech stack, including Chain Signatures and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) nodes.

Aptos will unlock approximately $50 million in APT tokens in September, adding to the $4.5 billion of total unlocks expected for this month among all cryptocurrencies.

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