NEAR Protocol’s Confidential Intents feature has quietly become one of the more interesting experiments in on-chain privacy, and the numbers are starting to reflect it. Total value locked in the system has climbed to roughly $26.65 million as of mid-June 2026, up from a range of $15 million to $20.7 million earlier this year.

That’s a meaningful jump for a product that only went live publicly on February 25, 2026. In less than four months, Confidential Intents has expanded to support transactions across more than 35 different blockchains, turning what started as a NEAR-native feature into a cross-chain privacy layer with real traction.

What Confidential Intents actually does

Confidential Intents addresses transaction visibility by running transactions through a dedicated NEAR private shard operated by permissioned validators. The key innovation is that transaction details are shielded from public exposure at every stage, including RPC interactions and mempool visibility. The system handles swaps, transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, covering the core actions that make up the vast majority of DeFi activity.

The permissioned validator model is worth noting. Rather than relying on fully open consensus for the private shard, NEAR uses a curated set of validators to process confidential transactions. This is a deliberate trade-off: some decentralization purists will bristle at the permissioned element, but it’s what makes the privacy guarantees possible without the computational overhead of something like zero-knowledge proofs running on every transaction.

An incentive program with a clever twist

On June 11, 2026, the protocol launched the [email protected] milestone incentive program. Participants can earn a share of 333,333 milestone tokens once aggregate Confidential Intents TVL reaches $70 million. Those tokens only convert to NEAR on a 1:1 basis if NEAR’s volume-weighted average price (VWAP) stays above $3.33 for three consecutive days.

The $70 million target represents roughly a 2.6x increase from the current $26.65 million TVL. The system has already grown from roughly $15 million to $26.65 million in recent months without a dedicated incentive program driving that growth.

Why institutions care about private execution

Confidential Intents is positioned to offer confidentiality rather than anonymity. The distinction is important: anonymity means nobody knows who you are, while confidentiality means counterparties and competitors can’t see your strategy in real time, but the underlying identity framework and compliance infrastructure remain intact.

The expansion to more than 35 chains amplifies this value proposition significantly. A privacy layer that only works on one chain is a nice feature. One that works across 35 chains is infrastructure.