NEAR Protocol's native token has surged nearly 80% in a week, climbing to about $4.29 as activity accelerates around the network's cross-chain and privacy-focused infrastructure.

The advance coincides with growing usage of NEAR Intents, the protocol's intent-based execution platform, which has drawn heightened interest from privacy-focused traders. NEAR Intents has processed roughly $29.3 billion in cumulative volume, including about $842 million over the past seven days.

NEAR Intents is an abstraction layer that lets users express what they want to do — such as swapping tokens, staking, or bridging assets — without worrying about how the transaction is executed on-chain. Users can request cross-chain swaps while competing market makers bid to execute them, enabling simplified, gasless, smart-contract-powered actions across the NEAR ecosystem and making Web3 interactions more intuitive and accessible. The design is intended to remove the technical friction of managing multiple chains, wallets, and bridges — a persistent pain point for users in an ecosystem where liquidity remains fragmented across many networks.

Zcash (ZEC) is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency whose shielded transactions are designed to conceal transaction details. In a sign of growing demand for privacy-oriented cross-chain trading, the Zcash wallet ZODL ranked as NEAR Intents' third-largest referral source by volume over the previous 24 hours, recording about $3.8 million across 458 transactions. A single ZEC swap worth roughly $613,000 was also among the largest transactions recorded on the platform during the same period.

Camran Khosravi, a research analyst at crypto asset manager Bitwise, said NEAR and Zcash are "complements," with NEAR providing ZEC holders access to confidential cross-chain infrastructure and liquidity.

NEAR's confidential trading platform has surpassed $70 million in total value locked, a standard gauge of capital committed to DeFi protocols, while the protocol is also expanding into confidential AI services, broadening its privacy-preserving toolkit beyond trading.

The rally places NEAR at the intersection of two growing crypto themes: privacy infrastructure and cross-chain liquidity. The usage metrics now in view — ZODL's standing among Intents referral sources, weekly Intents volume against the $842 million seven-day figure, and growth in confidential trading TVL from its current $70 million-plus base — offer the most direct way to track whether the current activity around NEAR's infrastructure continues.

This article was originally reported by BitcoinKE and has been rewritten for clarity.