NEAR Protocol has crossed $70 million in confidential total value locked, automatically triggering the first snapshot for its incentive program and setting aside 333,333 milestone tokens for eligible participants. According to a Sept. 17 announcement shared with crypto.news, users must maintain more than $100 in confidential balances and have an active swap history to qualify. Rewards stay locked until NEAR’s three-day volume-weighted average price reaches at least $3.33, and no single wallet can receive more than 2% of the distribution.
The milestone was reached through Confidential Intents, NEAR’s private execution system for cross-chain transactions. The protocol routes trades through a private NEAR shard, removing them from public mempool exposure and protecting users from front-running, strategy leakage and other forms of maximal extractable value. NEAR says Confidential Intents supports private execution across more than 30 connected blockchains. Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents, said confidentiality is “quickly becoming a core requirement for the industry,” and added that combining cross-chain liquidity with MEV protection gives institutions and DeFi users a way to transact at scale while retaining privacy.
Market data shows NEAR traded near $2.82 on Thursday, up roughly 16% over 24 hours. Its 20-day, 50-day and 200-day moving averages are aligned bullishly below the price, with RSI around 71. Futures open interest sits near $656 million, close to yearly highs, while daily trading volume is near $820 million. DeFi total value locked on NEAR rose almost 15% in one day to about $150 million. The token is pressing the top of a range that has capped it since June, and analysts see a weekly close above $3 as a potential trigger for continuation toward $4.
The AI-focused narrative continues to build. A filing to convert the Grayscale NEAR Trust into a spot ETF arrived in January 2026, and T. Rowe Price included NEAR in an actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETP in July. NEAR Intents has processed more than 19 million swaps and over $14 billion in volume across 35 chains, and was recently integrated with Hydration to widen cross-chain access to Zcash. The project’s roadmap positions NEAR Intents as settlement infrastructure for autonomous AI agents.
