NEAR token jumps 17% after ‘Confidential Intents’ launch, outpaces privacy tokens sector

$NEAR token climbed as much as 17% after launching “Confidential Intents,” a new private execution layer designed to shield trades from public view, extending a 40% weekly rally and outperforming both the CoinDesk 20 Index and the broader privacy token sector.

The feature was first unveiled last week at NEARCON in San Francisco, as previously reported by CoinDesk, and officially went live today.

Confidential Intents is live.

DeFi users, developers and institutions now unlock a wide range of privacy-first use cases without forgoing discretion.

Toggle it on and test it out at https://t.co/YBUSFVdjxE. https://t.co/RuXYTDUdXJ

— $NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) March 1, 2026

It routes transactions through a private shard linked to $NEAR’s mainnet, according to technical documentation on $NEAR’s blog, allowing users to toggle into confidential accounts to avoid front-running and sandwich attacks.

Unlike privacy coins such as Monero or Zcash, which are designed to hide transaction details by default, $NEAR’s system offers optional confidentiality focused on trade execution, keeping only specific transfers and positions out of public view while preserving auditability for law enforcement.

$NEAR wrote that the product is aimed squarely at institutions wary of broadcasting trading strategies on transparent ledgers.

Onchain transactions are visible before they settle, exposing order size, timing, and direction to bots that can trade against users.

That dynamic has long enabled so-called maximal extractable value, or MEV, strategies that act as a hidden tax on traders. By shifting execution of trades into a less visable environment, Confidential Intents is designed to keep transfers and cross-chain position management out of the public mempool

Unlike fully opaque privacy chains, $NEAR’s system offers selective disclosure within a compliance-aware framework, positioning the product as a bridge between traditional finance expectations and onchain settlement.

Still, onchain data curated by DeFiLlama shows $NEAR’s base-layer fees remain limited relative to its roughly $1.8 billion market capitalization.

That suggests investors are betting the confidential execution layer could draw institutional-sized flow onto the network, rather than responding to a sharp increase in current revenue.

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