Why Every Chain, Wallet & App Is Integrating NEAR Intents | Kendall Cole

The gist

NEAR Intents abstracts away blockchain complexity by letting users think in terms of assets rather than chains—swapping tokens across 35+ blockchains through a single interface. As crypto fragments into specialized ecosystems (Solana, Hyper Liquid, Robinhood Chain, etc.), Intents solves the coordination problem by providing infrastructure that all participants—wallets, exchanges, apps, and chains—integrate to access liquidity everywhere. This positions NEAR as the settlement and exchange layer for the multi-chain world.

Key takeaways

• Chain abstraction thesis: NEAR learned that being well-connected to other chains made it stronger, but the user experience required missing infrastructure. This led to building NEAR Intents, which now connects 35 chains with new ones integrating weekly.

• Stablecoin fragmentation: While a few mega-stablecoins (USDC, USDT) will dominate for liquidity and brand, many institutions will issue their own stablecoins but won't promote them as independent brands—they'll function as database entries for accounting, similar to tokenized deposits.

• B2B to B2C evolution: NEAR Intents started purely B2B serving wallets (Trust Wallet, Ledger) and aggregators (LiFi). The 2024 launch of near.com brought a consumer-facing product, while most volume still flows through B2B2C partnerships like Infinix.

• Confidential Intents: A privacy-preserving shard launched July 7 enables shielded asset custody and trading across 35+ chains without revealing balances or transaction details—solving enterprise concerns about competitive intelligence leakage (relevant to Alex Karp's recent AI critique).

• MiCA creates on-ramp opportunity: EU's Markets in Crypto Act eliminated Binance and Bybit from the EU market, leaving a gap that thin on-ramps (Monerium's EURe stablecoin via SEPA) plus NEAR's non-custodial infrastructure can fill—users get euros on-chain seamlessly while regulations become irrelevant on decentralized protocols.

• Real-world asset Cambrian explosion: Unlike meme coin proliferation, tokenized stocks (Robinhood Chain launched with $400k-$1M liquidity day one) create genuine demand for asset mobility infrastructure. Every new chain with unique assets creates integration urgency for NEAR Intents partners.

• NEAR's value capture mechanism: NEAR takes 10-20 basis points from every swap through Intents, which flows to the NEAR House of Stake for token buybacks. Volume is the north star, expanding as stablecoins, RWAs, prediction markets (Polymarket), and AI agents create new trading demand.

• Crypto's real business model is exchange: From Uniswap to GMX to Hyper Liquid to stablecoins themselves, successful crypto businesses are fundamentally exchange infrastructure. NEAR Intents applies this pattern at the settlement layer—becoming the exchange between apps, chains, and assets.

Notable quotes

• "The goal is basically just to initially, the goal was to make it so you forgot which chain you were on. But increasingly, the goal is to make it forget that you're on chains at all." — Kendall Cole

• "If you want your users to be able to participate in this global economy, then you have no choice but to do it, and you absolutely should." — Kendall Cole, on why regulators should tokenize their currencies

• "Every successful business model of crypto is doing some form of exchange...NEAR is just another form of an exchange, but it's got a little bit of its own kind of properties that carve out space for it." — David Hoffman

Worth a full listen?

Listen if you're building on multi-chain infrastructure, operating a wallet or exchange that needs cross-chain liquidity, or want to understand how privacy and regulatory arbitrage shape the next generation of crypto rails—otherwise the TLDR captures the core business mechanics.