NEAR Intents

NEAR Intents is a multichain swap protocol built on NEAR Protocol that replaces traditional automated market maker pools with a competitive solver network. Rather than prescribing exact execution paths, users and AI agents express a high-level intention — for example, "swap ETH on Ethereum for USDC on Solana" — and a decentralized network of market makers races to fulfill the request at the best available price and route. The protocol launched publicly in November 2024 and was featured at ETHDenver 2025 as a flagship example of NEAR's chain abstraction initiative. It was developed by the NEAR Foundation in collaboration with Zingo Labs, a ZK-powered solver marketplace.

How It Works: Express, Solve, Settle

NEAR Intents operates through three stages.

Express: A user, wallet, or AI agent creates a signed intent message describing the desired outcome — asset in, asset out, amount, and acceptable parameters. This message is broadcast to the solver network.

Solve: A short bidding window of roughly one second opens. Every connected solver evaluates whether it can fulfill the trade and, if so, responds with a competing quote. Solvers do not draw from on-chain liquidity pools; instead they source liquidity from wherever it is cheapest — centralized exchange order books, OTC desks, other DEXs, and cross-chain arbitrage paths. Because solvers compete openly, users receive rates that consistently match or beat pooled AMM pricing.

Settle: Once the best quote is selected, NEAR's verifier smart contract handles on-chain settlement. Using NEAR's Chain Signatures technology, NEAR validators co-sign the required transactions on external blockchains through a threshold signature scheme, allowing final settlement to span multiple chains without a trusted bridge operator or wrapped asset intermediary. No single party controls the signing keys. The full round trip typically completes in under a minute.

Key Features

No pools: There are no liquidity pools to drain, skew, or suffer impermanent loss. Solvers front their own capital and rebalance afterward, which structurally reduces the slippage and MEV exposure familiar from AMM-based trading.

Broad chain coverage: The protocol supports 31 or more chains, including Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Arbitrum, Base, TRON, and Starknet. New chains can be added to the routing set without requiring users or integrators to make changes.

Low fees: Because solvers optimize routes end-to-end, fees can reach as low as 1 basis point (0.01%), well below typical DEX swap costs.

Developer tooling: The protocol exposes a 1-Click Swap REST API, a React widget for embedding swaps in any interface, and TypeScript, Go, and Rust SDKs. This allows wallets, dApps, and aggregators to integrate cross-chain swap capability without maintaining their own solver infrastructure or bridge integrations.

AI agent compatibility: The intent model is well-suited to AI-driven execution. An autonomous agent can sign and broadcast intents without managing gas, bridge approvals, or transaction sequencing across chains — the solver network handles routing. NEAR Intents participates in the Open Agents Alliance alongside Coinbase AgentKit and Eliza Labs, positioning it as a key execution layer for autonomous agent-driven transactions.

Confidential Intents: Launched in March 2026, this privacy extension executes cross-chain swaps inside a private shard, hiding transaction details from the public blockchain. It prevents frontrunning and MEV attacks while providing selective disclosure options for compliance purposes, targeting institutional and privacy-conscious users.

Ecosystem Integrations

Major infrastructure providers have built on NEAR Intents. LI.FI, a cross-chain liquidity aggregator, integrated NEAR Intents to route users through its solver network for one-step swaps across 25-plus chains, including direct flows like ETH-to-USDC-on-Solana without manual bridging steps. Brave Wallet added native NEAR Intents support, giving Brave users access to the solver network directly from their browser wallet. Starknet partnered with the protocol to bring cross-chain interoperability to its users. SimpleSwap has also integrated it as a replacement for legacy bridge-based approaches.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Solana is one of the primary settlement destinations on NEAR Intents. Users can move assets into and out of Solana without acquiring SOL for gas or navigating a separate bridging interface — the solver handles routing and pays gas costs as part of fulfillment. The protocol has drawn public endorsements from within the Solana developer community. Helius Labs founder and CEO Mert and Jupiter developer Anmol have both publicly supported NEAR Intents, reflecting demand within the Solana ecosystem for chain-abstracted liquidity access that reaches off-chain sources. For Solana-native DeFi applications, NEAR Intents represents an inbound liquidity channel that does not rely on bridged token wrappers.

Token

NEAR Intents has no native protocol token. Users pay no separate fee beyond the spread built into solver quotes. Solvers earn by sourcing liquidity more cheaply than their quoted price and retaining the margin, aligning solver incentives with user outcomes without requiring a token-based governance or rewards layer.

Traction

• November 2024: Protocol launches publicly
• November 2025: $5 billion in cumulative transaction volume
• January 2026: $10 billion in cumulative transaction volume
• Mid-2026: $20 billion in cumulative transaction volume; over 25 million swaps processed

The volume trajectory has been accelerating: the protocol doubled cumulative volume twice within seven months of first crossing the $5 billion mark, making it one of the fastest-growing cross-chain execution protocols of 2025.

Security

Settlement relies on NEAR's verifier smart contract and Chain Signatures, a threshold signature scheme operated by NEAR validators. No single validator controls external-chain signing keys. Solvers participate permissionlessly and bear their own execution risk; a solver quoting a worse rate than a competitor simply loses the trade, creating economic alignment without requiring additional on-chain enforcement. Specific third-party audit reports have not been publicly itemized in available documentation.