Confidential Intents: Confidential Execution for Cross-Chain Transactions

February 24, 2026

In DeFi today, every action, position, and order is public onchain. Your order size, the token pair, the direction, the timing—all visible before your transaction settles.

MEV bots see your pending swap and frontrun it. Sandwich attacks bracket your order to extract value on both sides. Anyone watching the mempool can trade against your position before you get filled.

For retail users, it's a tax. For institutions and power users, it's a dealbreaker. They won't put meaningful amounts of value onchain when every transaction broadcasts their strategy.

This is why centralized exchanges still dominate trading volume. Not because they're better, but because they keep transactions confidential.

Introducing Confidential Intents

Confidential Intents provides restricted visibility for anyone who needs to manage cross-chain positions with confidence and control, from institutions and enterprises to sophisticated DeFi users. Powered by a NEAR private shard, Confidential Intents delivers a practical confidentiality layer that supports DeFi workflows with compliance-aware design and cryptographically-secured execution.

While cryptographically private, ZK-only systems exist, they only support a narrow set of operations and require client-side state sync. For NEAR Intents users, Confidential Intents allows you to simply toggle between your Main Account and Confidential Account. You can opt into confidentiality when you want it, across transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, with swaps coming soon.

The outcome: no MEV extraction, no frontrunning, no strategy copying, no forced liquidations from visible positions.

Confidential Intents unlocks a wide range of privacy-first use cases for everyone from DeFi users to application developers:

  • DeFi users: Retail traders stop losing value to sandwich attacks. Whales move size without signaling. Anyone managing cross-chain positions gets the same execution without broadcasting their strategy.
  • Institutions: Protect positions from front-running and MEV. Keep transactions confidential to prevent market signaling. Enable selective disclosure and auditable execution while preserving confidentiality.
  • Enterprises: Payroll, treasury, and supply chain transactions stay confidential. Keep salaries, vendor payments, liquidity positions, and negotiated rates out of public view— without leaving onchain infrastructure.
  • Applications: Maintain confidential control of assets across multiple chains, ensure confidential inputs for sealed-bid mechanisms, and enable hidden state for inventories, maps, and more for essential game logic.

How Confidential Intents Works

Confidential Intents runs on a NEAR private shard—a dedicated execution environment operated by a decentralized set of independent, permissioned validators—connected to NEAR mainnet via a TEE-based bridge.

When you go confidential on near.com or through a third-party application that integrates NEAR Intents, your transaction executes on the NEAR private shard. Deposits, transfers, and swaps all stay out of public view. You can move funds between your confidential and public NEAR Intents accounts at any time, or withdraw to any foreign chain.

This design eliminates client-side ZK proof generation entirely. No complex wallet setup. No state sync. Same simple UX as a public transaction, with cryptographic integrity preserved within a compliance-aware architecture.

This is not a mixing service or post-hoc anonymization. It's a confidentiality layer built into the execution environment itself.

Try Confidential Intents Today

Unlike fully opaque privacy chains, Confidential Intents supports selective disclosure and auditable execution. Institutions can support required disclosures without exposing position details to the public chain. That balance—reduced public visibility with selective disclosure—is what separates Confidential Intents from both fully transparent DeFi and fully opaque privacy chains.

Today, centralized exchanges process the majority of crypto trading volume—in large part because they offer confidential execution. Confidential Intents brings that same confidential execution to cross-chain DeFi, secured by the verifiable infrastructure of NEAR Intents. The result is a structural unlock: institutional-grade flow can move onchain without sacrificing discretion, accelerating volume and making DeFi usable at scale.

Confidential Intents is now live. Toggle it on at near.com.

How To Use NEAR Intents With OpenClaw Confidential Intents: Confidential Execution for Cross-Chain Transactions

Join the community:

Follow Near:

Confidential Intents: Confidential Execution for Cross-Chain Transactions | NEAR