NEAR Protocol enables private perps by default, powered by Hyperliquid

NEAR Protocol just flipped the default setting on perpetual futures privacy. As of September 17, every perps position opened through NEAR’s trading interfaces now routes deposits through a confidential shard, meaning ownership and deposit origins are hidden from public view.

The feature, built on what NEAR calls Confidential Intents, uses a trusted execution environment (TEE) bridge to separate a trader’s public account from their trading activity.

How it works, and what it doesn’t hide

The confidentiality layer shields who is trading and where the capital came from. It does not hide the trades themselves.

Positions still appear on Hyperliquid’s order book, just like any other perpetual contract. What changes is that on-chain sleuths can no longer connect a specific deposit wallet to a specific leveraged bet.

The Hyperliquid backbone

NEAR’s perps infrastructure isn’t built from scratch. The protocol integrated Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures engine back on June 9, enabling deposits from over 35 chains and access to more than 50 trading markets with leverage up to 40x.

Hyperliquid processed roughly $240 billion in perps volume in the 30 days leading up to mid-September. By plugging into that liquidity rather than bootstrapping its own, NEAR sidesteps the cold-start problem that kills most new derivatives platforms.

The cross-chain funding works through NEAR Intents, which handle automatic conversions to USDC regardless of which chain the deposit originates from.

Market reaction and TVL milestones

The confidentiality announcement didn’t go unnoticed by the market. NEAR’s token price rallied between 21% and 45% in the days following the September 17 update, reaching a range of approximately $3.21 to $3.45. Trading volume surged roughly 120% over 24 hours.

The timing wasn’t accidental. The launch of confidential-by-default perps coincided with Confidential Intents’ total value locked crossing $70 million, a threshold that triggered the first snapshot for an incentive program.

By making confidentiality the default rather than an opt-in feature, NEAR is making a design philosophy statement. Most privacy tools in crypto require users to actively choose them, which limits adoption to the privacy-conscious minority.