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

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

NEAR wants users to stop thinking about blockchains altogether. Proximity Labs co-founder Kendall Cole joins David to explain how NEAR Intents connects 35 chains, powers products like Infinex, brings tokenized assets and confidential transactions into one seamless experience, and turns fragmented crypto markets into a single account where users see assets, not infrastructure. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 📊BITGET | TOKENIZED STOCKS 2.0 https://bankless.cc/bitget-stocks 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:29 Chains Need Neutrality 4:20 Near’s Chain Abstraction Vision 6:03 Wallets to Retail Expansion 9:30 Bootstrapping Liquidity and Partners 11:23 RWA Asset Explosion 15:00 Tokenized Stocks on Near 15:57 One App Across Chains 19:01 Near as Chain Abstraction 21:35 Trading Bots and Payments 24:54 MiCA’s Market Shock 28:16 Noncustodial Compliance Strategy 29:17 Euro Onramps into Near 31:38 Regulation Meets On-Chain Freedom 38:09 Confidential Intents Launch 41:15 Privacy for Users and Firms 43:36 Private Zcash Routing 46:50 Privacy for AI Models 49:52 Near’s Fee Capture Model 52:19 Crypto as Exchange Infrastructure --- RESOURCES Kendall Cole https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendall-cole-91b00534/ Proximity Labs https://x.com/proximityfi Near Intents https://x.com/near_intents --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, Kendall Cole is a co-founder of Proximity Labs. That is a research and development firm focused on the near ecosystem. Kendall, welcome to Bankless. Yeah, thank you for having me, David. It's decided to be here. Kendall, we've got a lot to talk about. I want to start with this one. How many stable coins will there be?

I'm reminded of the same kind of conversations, how many layer twos will there be on Ethereum? And once upon time, I was like saying there will be thousands of layer twos. And, you know, there are quite a lot of layer twos on Ethereum. but a few of them are very large, you know, typical peridot distribution. How do you think about in the future, how many stable coins will there be broadly?

So, yeah, I'm, I guess, similar to believers in L2 proliferation. I do think that will become true for stable coins, certainly in the immediate term, if not in the long term. I think that we probably won't see many more brands, branded stable coins like a USC or USCT, they get really big. I mean, we might see some like OUSD is kind of an interesting initiative, you know, from the bridge crew.

But I don't think that's going to make sense for users. I think what's going to actually happen is that a lot of different players are going to issue their own stable coins, but they're not really going to promote them as an independent brand. They're going to show them as USD or maybe as, you know, some kind of indication they're a stable coin, but they're not going to, like, they're not going to care that the user knows the full name and the ticker of that particular stable coin. It's just going to be used as like a piece.

of almost like a database entry for the fact that you have a student. Yeah, exactly. It's an asset and a ledger. It's an asset and a ledger, yeah. But I do think that a lot of different institutions for a variety of reasons are going to issue their own stable coin.

Okay. There's the stablecoin conversation. So maybe a few stable coins are kind of like the Bitcoin and the ETHs. They're going for the money. They're going for the liquidity, the network effects, the brand, you know, the trust. And we kind of know who those are.

I think as you kind of just saluted to, oh, USD from Open Standard is like this new entrance trying to penetrate that market. But anything downstream from that is like kind of turning into just like tokenized deposits. Like your tokenized deposit is not going to be money,

but it is a useful tool, back end efficiency upgrade for Wall Street. But what about the chains? Because there's tempo, there's arc, there's stable, there's plasma. Similar answer?

Or how do you think about this kind of thing? So, I would say less, way less on the chains. Like I'm not super, I mean, obviously, like certain chains, they have a really unique distribution situation. So, like, Tempo is definitely the best example. I mean, obviously, Circle, they have a lot of, they have a lot of influence.

And so I think they can probably get a lot of different groups to be using their chain. I think the hardest part is going to be, like, the best positioning for chains, I think, is credible neutrality. And most of these newer initiatives, are like kind of very specific to either an issuer or like some type of player in the broader ecosystem. And I think that that aspect of their sort of background and story and ultimately

value of control mechanism is going to like hinder their ability to be that kind of credibly neutral layer and actually like work with all of these different players. So, you know, some of them will do well. You know, yeah, I think tempo arc like a few of those are going to do well. You know, I think like plasma is kind of taking more of the approach that actually Nira is sort of taking where they've built a blockchain that's really designed to serve a different product,

like a very specific product in Plasman 1. So maybe they have a shot there as well. But yeah, I think like generally just having like, you know, this, if you're backed by an issue or you have like way too much

of an entrenched interest, while that helps you get in that initial distribution, I think ultimately it's going to be difficult for you to be that credibly neutral air and work with a lot of different parties. So like I don't actually think we'll see that many of those do as well. And I think, you know,

really people are going to use the usual suspects that there am, Solana, some of the major L2s instead. Kendall, the reason why I asked all this is because you operate in the world of fragmentation or maybe defragmentation is maybe like the better word. Talk about what you do at proximity labs and in and around the near ecosystem. Why is fragmentation your deal? Yeah, great question. Yeah, so we're basically a core contributed to the broader near ecosystem.

and like most of these similar groups, Near Intense has been a guiding light for quite some time. And the original thesis that Near Intense actually kind of came out of was this idea of chain abstraction. And that was something we learned just by running Near. It was like, you know, Near was made a lot stronger when we were well connected to all of these other chains and ecosystems. But getting the user experience right on that was quite difficult.

And there was a lot of infrastructure that was missing. And then on top of that infrastructure, there were a lot of product experiences that were missing. And so, like, it was that sort of belief, a set of beliefs that is what led to us to ultimately build near intents and get to where we are now, which is connecting, I think, 35 different chains and there's new ones every week at this point.

And delivering what we believe is actually, like, the simplest experience for users who want to forget about which chain they're on and one think more in terms of assets. Because, like, ultimately think that's what's important, right? Like, chains are, chains obviously are important, but really it's the assets that most users care about. So yeah, 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.

And it's just these like really simple experiences that feel more like, you know, Robin Hood or, you know, a high quality type of almost a brokerage experience than, you know, a typical blockchain or like crypto experience. Now, are you guys pointed at just like retail end users who want to be trading tokens or who is like kind of the main customer product or entity that you guys are building for? Yeah, good question. I mean, so there's two, there's two splits there. So Neurintets initially started more as like purely B2B. And so the main customers are like were and still are wallets. It was like, you know, trust wallet, ledger, like aggregators, like LiFi. And, you know, these type of more like, it was more of a pure infrastructure. There was no like really front end sort of component to near intent.

As of earlier this year, there was the launch of NIR.com, which is more of like a true end user product. And so, I mean, ultimately those have very different users, right? Like, NER.com is ultimately just trying to be like the simplest possible experience for any user globally who wants. And right now exposure to crypto. currencies, but increasingly real-world assets and stable coins as well. And even, you know, integrations with products like hyperliquid and there's a few others coming down the pipe there. But, you know, I mean, most of the volume for near intent still comes from all these excellent partners that are more like, you know, B2C. And there's, yeah, there's some evolution

there happening, like some more, you know, kind of traditional players that are starting to look at near intents as a way just to make it very simple for either themselves or for their end customers to you know, get access to all of these different assets. My exposure to near intents came in this one-two punch where I was using Infinex more and more and Infinex is integrated into near Intense, which is basically how Infinex does its magic secret sauce where like, hey, I don't need my ledger anymore. Not that, you know, ledger is a great product, but I just want to click on my password manager with all my other passwords and Infinex solves that problem. And then it hosts all of the assets through near Intentz that I would ever want it to.

And so I was like, oh, look at this, like, UX upgrade in my wallet experience that I'm getting from Infinex, and it's hooked into Near Intents, which is where the matcha come from. And that was great. And then I saw on the other side of things, Venice hooked into Near AI. I was like, oh, wait, Venice is like getting adopted. And it's got this product that's offering to the world. And how is that product being built? Oh, it's being built with Near in the background. Like, there's another point for Near. I saw all these, like, different, like, ways that Near was getting integrated. And then I was, The last part of the story is that I was like just cleaning up dust from old wallets, you know, like accumulated 30 wallets over the years. I just like, all right, let's clear it out. You know, I have tokens on like Monad. I have tokens on, you know, the Ethereum Layer 1. I got tokens. Where's like one single place I can send it all?

And that was the first time I opened up near dot com. And I was like, oh, let me just send it to the place that can like connect with everything. And so as I'm clearing out all my dust, like I don't have, like the destination of where do I send everything ended up just being just like this. the NIR.com wallet because it integrates with every single blockchain. And I'm like, oh, and also, NIR never exposed me to any blockchain ever.

It just showed me, as you were saying, assets only. And so there's this like, it's just like, near just kept on poking up in my world, like a little bit more and more and more. And so like to talk about just like how that experience is, like where you guys are at with that experience and where you guys are trying to go with it, both with NIR Intents and if you want NIR AI in the back end,

but also near.com the front end, like retail user experience as I was using it for. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, glad you had that experience. Infinex was, it has been an amazing partner in this journey. They kind of saw the vision. As we were laying it out, Kane was really great about that. Yeah, so, I mean, when it started, it was basically like, okay, we just need to integrate all the chains people want.

And that was an enormous amount of work. I mean, my team did not deal with that. That was a massive credit to the, you know, New York Sense Corps team and the bridge team from near one that have and still are kind of putting together all these different, you know, as robust as possible integration. It's always different chains. Just like an enormous amount of engineering effort that goes into that. And so like that was, I mean, it was as simple as that.

It was basically like, okay, we basically just need to support these chains, step one and make it so you can actually like interact with these assets in a non-custodial and safe way. Then step two was like, okay, now we need to go out and like recruit a bunch and work with a bunch of solvers and market makers to actually be able to, like, quote with these different assets. And, you know, basically that took years, right? Like, it's, you know, we're kind of coming out of that, that, like, very long period of just, like, basically bootstrapping all of the chain integrations and all of the, you know, like the liquidity. And then as a piece of that was, like, getting integrated into Infinex and into these different players that actually would have

end users that are coming and, like, bringing order flow so that, like, this, you know, this entire system works. So yeah, that's really what it's been about up until now. And it was kind of like the growth potential for your instance is really as simple as like we just need to integrate these chains and then the assets on those chains. So most of the chains that I think people want to trade on are more or less integrated. There's still others that are coming down the pipe. I mean, there's still a roadmap to be, you know, to kind of be completed there. But increasingly, the focus is a lot more on like, well, just making sure that we have, you know, the best liquidity possible so that like users are are getting the best possible quotes.

And that's an ongoing game. Like, that's basically an infinite game. I don't think that'll ever end. There's always competition there, which is great. And I think, you know, ultimately makes the end product better for everyone. And then assets and, you know, being able to support all these different assets. And that obviously is going through an insane kind of explosion. You know, I think before I was basically just like coming up with new, you know,

cryptocurrencies for people to trade new tokens, which like, yeah, you know, sometimes work, sometimes doesn't. But, you know, now with like the kind of like RWA explosion and like all the serious players actually getting involved there, the SEC coming up with like real ways to issue token like tokenized assets on chain that are, you know, high quality regulated products. And then, you know, things like polymarket that are, you know, CalCHA that have created like entirely new asset classes that are extremely popular now. That's actually given us like a whole new roadmap, right? It's like making sure that all of those things are available to users on near intense in a way that's as seamless as possible. So basically we went from like chain integrations being like the main thing, then to, you know, just like integrators being the main thing to now just making sure that we actually have all of the assets that users like want access to globally, right? Like creating true global financial markets, right?

Like I think, I mean, this is the story for near intense is very similar to the story for, you know, blockchings in general, which is like the real magic is that we create this kind of stateless financial system where anyone globally can have very easy, you know, kind of ideally frictionless access to all the different financial assets and products that they might. might want. And so, you know, we've done a lot of work on that kind of crypto piece of it and like increasingly we're doing work still in the crypto piece of it, but also like expanding into, you know, all types of other assets as those as those come online, right? Like I think we're still very much in the early innings of, you know, all the regulation coming into plate and all of these different, you know, great groups like putting together the products and bringing them on chain. And then we want to make sure that like Near Intent is able to support all those assets early and often and then expose those to users through near.com, through all the partners like Infinex,

through whoever account might be there. So there was like this original Cambrian explosion with meme coins where there was already thousands of assets in crypto but then meme coins came and it really just like, you know, order of magnitude

increase the number of assets out there. But they're all still like inert and fleeting but like nonetheless the number of assets went up to like a bajillion but no one really cared about them other than the meme coin traders and so they didn't really pull proliferate.

No one really needed to integrate with these things. The next, you alluded to it, the next explosion of assets that I'm seeing on chain is just like all the real world asset stuff, all the tokenized stocks, like Robin Hood chain, for example, launched on the first. And you can, you, I'm just looking at the real world asset. dot XYZ page for Robin Hood. And there's 30 assets, you know, Nvidia, Robin Hood token, Tesla, Robin Hood token stock, Micron, AMD.

And these all have somewhere between $400 and a million dollars of liquidity. and they won. Still needs to be a lot more. But like, if I was interested in integrating tokenized stocks and I'm a chain, well, then I need someone to get me that token on my chain. And I'm assuming that's where near intents can come in and kind of fill that gap of like whether I'm even a wallet or a blockchain or even a layer one app on some layer one, be it like Avey or something on Solana.

and I see Robin Hood issuing tokenized stocks on one single chain, then I'm like, well, how do I get those assets into like my app? And so I'm sure that like this explosion, this like Cambridge explosion of real world tokenized assets is actually far more of an opportunity for near than like meme coins or any other asset revolution before them. Is that correct? And talk to me about this experience that you've been having.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that what you kind of state is exactly right. A great opportunity is when like a new chain launches that has like unique super high quality assets. And so then there's this question for basically everyone is like, how do we make it as seamless as possible to move from like wherever we currently are, wherever our assets currently are into this new chain and like into those new assets. And like, yeah, I mean, so that's that's exactly right. I mean, I think we're very excited about what Robin had's been doing there. You know, only a matter of time before before that support will be near intense because clearly there's going to be demand.

Right. So yeah, that's exactly right. Like, if you look at like the rebalancing of asset movements across chains, like, I mean, it's constantly changing, right? And I think that change is really sort of what we see as the opportunity. Like there's just a lot of these different ecosystems have like really been able to entrench themselves in like, and get some like really sticky demand. I mean, you know, salon obviously has done a fantastic job.

Ethereum is still, you know, ultimately the king. Even Tron, you know, like has like a very unique kind of like role that they sort of play. And so the more that that exists and that that is true, and we don't see that changing. I think we might not see the insane fragmentation that we had of like a billion L2s, right? Which was like an almost like, I mean like an impossible to solve problem, which is like too much. But I think we are going to see, you know, at least a dozen or more of these different ecosystems that are like really, I mean, hyperliquid, another great example, right? That are just going to be like really entrenched and thriving. And so the interaction between them and like making sure you have this like nice abstraction between them is going to be really important.

Ultimately, users, they want to be on trade on hyperliquid. They want to be able to, like, you know, bet on on polymarket. They want to be able to buy Tesla on Robin Hood chain. They, like, want to be able to, you know, use AVE on Ethereum. And then they want to be able to, like, you know, transfer, like, pay their friends and stable coins on Solana, right? And it's like, so if you want to do all those different things, you need an experience that makes that just feel like one application, right?

And so, but Mue.com, the goal is for that to be one of those applications, but we also want to power as many of these as possible. Like Infidx, I think he's done an amazing job there as well. Like we want to, we want to make all of these different experiences possible so that, you know, users are finally just like really excited to use these products that ultimately are just non-custodial and backed by, you know, all of these on-chain products, which is the vision we're all, we've all been trying to kind of push for for a long time now. There's been a handful of like companies that are going after like the super app idea or

the financial super app. Like, what Coinbase wants you to be able to. It's like, it's basically the thing. It's like Coinbase wants to build. Robin Hood, any neobank, because I think everyone kind of has the tools to be like the super app. And I was thinking about this,

this is a while ago, and I was like, you know what the original super app was? Layer ones. Like layer ones were supposed to be, and are the place where like any asset gets tokenized well, you know, is tokenized on Ethereum.

Like any financial application is built on Ethereum. Now that's kind of like spread out. and now it's been like fragmented, Ethereum is not really the epicenter that it was once, but nonetheless it has all of these different apps and things. And the thesis that I, you know, once had for Ethereum is that kind of like in the same way that Bitcoiners have the same thesis

where if it's useful, it will eventually become built on Ethereum, or excuse me, on Bitcoin. And for Ethereum the same way. Like if that's useful, like if it's good, it'll be tokenized on Ethereum, which is still true. And then it's also getting to like, you know, and then there's also perps on hyper. super liquid and there's like meme coins on Solana.

And so I think like the real manifestation of like this super, the open source super app thesis is potentially being expressed in near.com. Whereas like because of intense, if there is anything that is of use and of interest to anyone, because of near intense, you can surface it on near.com. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, I'll leave this to that team to,

you know, kind of reveal as they're putting it together. But so I think one thing that's not very well known about near intense, like people think of it as swaps. And that's obviously a huge, you know, the most important part of it for now. But really near intense is like true chain abstraction infrastructure. It's like you can have what is in your account that's actually custodying assets on any chain and can also then interact with any protocol on any chain.

So like Hyperlocut, I think is one of the early examples where they showed that experience where like you can, the swap can always become a back. piece of it where it's just like if you happen to have assets on different chains, sometimes even the same asset on different chains, right? Like you could have USC on Polygon, but you need to have it, you need to get it to hyperliquid so that you can, you know, take a purpose of chain. That's going to just become a background piece.

And really, it's the most important piece of technology that was built there is account that can just actually sign any transaction on any chain. And thus, like, use anything that exists on any chain. So it's this really nice primitive that allows, NIR.com to go and actually integrate all of these different products that exist on all these different places while keeping the UX very, very seamless. And then the other really key piece they built there is they have really powerful kind of like gas abstraction where they're, I mean, basically it doesn't feel like you as a user on NER.com ever are touching gas fees. The only time

you really experience that is when you're depositing from, like, into NIR.com from wherever you are, you have to, you know, very explicitly on your side, pay that gas fee on whatever chain. but once you're on nere.com, like, it's all a completely abstracted away. So, yeah, that, like, core piece is where, like, basically any chain that pops into existence, as long as, you know, Near Chain Signature Stingers supports the signature scheme, which, I mean, there's really only two that anybody uses at this point in EDDSA and ECDSA. It's not a problem. And then, you know, obviously, if there's another one that arose with post-quantum or whatever,

then that scene will, of course, that support as needed. And so that means that, yeah, there's this really great primitive, basically, to have that like that kind of non-custrial everything app. They're like preserves the really important properties while also just having a pretty simple time to basically adopt and integrate all these different apps regardless of where they are that people might use. That's kind of why it's like, yeah,

near is still a layer one that's really key for building all this stuff on top of, but we no longer have to worry about like get it convincing all of these different like great app developers to actually come and build directly on near. They can build on whatever chain is convenient for them. And then, you know, users who have some exposure to an integration of mirror intents or use nero.com directly

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I want to talk about recent current events and how this kind of like near model for the world applies here. So what's going on with Mika right now and how it's just impacting the flows of like crypto companies and crypto users in Europe? Yeah. Yeah, it was a big week last week. That was, I guess, the final sort of deadline for, I guess, I mean, anybody who falls under sort of like the Mika, you know, Mika regime, definitely the biggest news there was, you know, some of the exchanges and the moves that they had to make.

So like the finance, you know, they were not able to secure their license before that timeline. I do expect they will get it eventually. but who knows. And so yeah, I guess like if you're, you know, an EU user, you currently do not have access to Binance, which is pretty massive given that they are the number one exchange, or at least were the number one exchange in the EU. And then I think the second biggest news that I saw there was like,

so by bit, which does have an EU and micro-neco-registered entity. But that entity, they had to move users over to it, which creates some friction. And then they also, they don't have perpetual swaps, which is obviously a very popular product that they're, offer. And so like the two of those together like actually left kind of, I think, like a pretty massive, you know, massive gap where like you had all of these people that all of a sudden needed to either move to a meika registered exchange or needed to start looking on chain at some of the different products. So I think that's like, that was like a massive sort of, you know,

tailwind for the on chain spaces. All of a sudden there's like, you know, people who didn't want to move before because like they, you know, it's additional friction and like, why would they all of a sudden we're looking for a home? And so like it's an opportunity basically for them to, you consider like, oh, maybe on-chain has actually become, you know, just a competitive product in a lot of ways. And this is an opportunity to do that. So I think that was the biggest news. We're also obviously, we're excited to, I think similar to, you know, a genius in the U.S., like the fact that Nomega is now kind of in full force. And there was quite a number of, you know, actually regulated and compliant Euro stable coin issuers. You know, I think we're starting to see

the similar adoption we're seeing, you know, from U.S. fintechs and banks where like they're actually comfortable exposing those products directly to their users. Because now they're like, okay, this is, we understand what this is. We know what a Eurostable coin that's actually regulated means and like the protections that it has for our users and like we feel comfortable actually giving them that experience. And I mean, ultimately, I think that is the, you know, like this is what's going to make on ramps like as frictionless as possible is you'll just be able to get access to, you know, these, whether it's a Eurostable coin, a U.S. dollar stable coin or whatever currency,

you're going to be able to get access to that directly from your bank or your fintech app. And so getting on chain will be just as simple as moving money to anywhere else you would move money from from your bank, which is, I think, it would be a pretty magical time. I was doing some of the numbers before recording. Only 210 crypto firms operating in Europe received their authorization by the July 1st deadline. That's out of like 3,000. So like 7% got it in time, 7% clearance rate. you know, nice job, victory to Europe for all their compliance.

Yeah. And so like, as you said, it leaves a big hole in the market, especially when it's buy-ban, finance and by bit. But how does near.com, I know you're not on a neared.com team, but does neer.com need to be compliant, or is that kind of the whole deal where it's like, well, maybe somebody owns the front end,

but the near blockchain just accepts user inputs. How does NIR as a project fill that gap left behind in the EU from Bynes and by bit. Yeah, I mean, I'll let the near.com team speak to their specific stance there. But as far as near intense and broadly and at least like how we interact with it, like it, the goal is for, you know,

for near intents to be to be non-custodian. Like near intents, the court protocol is in fact non-custodial. And so because of that, you know, that a lot of like Micah does not, or Mika does not specifically, you know, apply to, you know, at least to near intents itself. Now, so for integrators,

they have to kind of, you know, do their own sort of, you know, legal analysis on like, and a lot of that will come down to, like, how the keys are managed on behalf of users and, you know, the different aspects there. But I think what is powerful is that Neurintense can be used, at least, in these non-custodial products that, you know, are able to just more seamlessly onboard users. And so to give an example, you know, of something that, you know, that happened last week on near Intense is one of these regulated Eurostable coins issued by Manarium, it's called Uri, was launched on Near Intense and also on Near.com.

And part of the reason that that was like kind of an earlyish initiative in getting a Euro stable coin listed on Near Intense, and integrated into Near Intense, is that Menarium has done a really great job of making it frictionless for European bank account holders to use SEPA instant to transfer funds to, in this case, they transfer it to Manarium as the issuer, and the Menarium gives them one-to-one no fees, Uri, as basically in return for that, for that Euro. And they do that for both on and off-rams.

And so if you use one of the, you know, Menarium, you can use the Minarium. You can use the Monarium app directly or you can use like NOSIS. I think it's a really great option. Noses is in a very good job of creating an app that's like, I mean, incredibly seamless, no gas fees, all of that. You do have to KYC, but once you do that KYC with them, you can straight up bank transfer euros into NOSIS. You'll get URI on the NOSIS chain. and then we support, or Neurintent supports Uri, so you can deposit that into Neur.com,

and then you can trade for any asset that's support on Neer.com. So it's actually, I mean, depending on, you know, depending on the day and like the solvers, there's some solvers doing some really tight quotes with USDC. And so that actually unlocks, like, using USCC as the underlying pair, that unlocks like really competitive pricing for Euros to Bitcoin, to Zcash, to all these different assets that are on Neer.com. And that's kind of just the beginning. Like, I think it's cool that you have that experience.

there is still generally going to be that KYC blocker. And I think the next phase is that there's a lot of European banks that are already looking into at various stages of integration of doing an even deeper kind of integration with Euros. And I think the gold standard for that experience that happened a few weeks ago is like Cash App did their integration of stable coins where like you actually do not even deal with like the blockchains or gas fees or any sort of pricing at all in order to transfer USCC out from your dollar balance

on cash app. So if we see that same experience moving to European banks, then it won't feel like an on-rap anymore. It'll just be like, oh, yeah, just, you know, you can transfer from your European bank account into nero.com because all you have to do is you'll get an address on nr.com. You paste that into your bank app, and you just transfer 100 euros, and then, bam,

all of a sudden you're able to buy all these different assets. You're on chain. You can participate in, you know, any sort of application on any sort of chain, which I think is going to be really magical. Okay, so this is the part that, like, I get kind of excited about because this shows how silly and dumb and ineffective regulation is. This is me speaking, but you can let me go on my, like, libertarian soapbox for a moment.

So all the big fintechs that are no longer compliant in EU, as of July 1st, like six days ago, the grace period for Mika is over. And so, like, now people are truly, if you're uncompliant, you are now illegal in the eyes of the EU. And so now like ByBet and Binance, if you said, has to have bad out from the market. One of the big reasons why Mika was established was monetary sovereignty. Like the EU was trying to protect the euro as a unit and as a brand and as it's like money, like didn't want to leak value of the euro.

And so Mika is supposed to protect the euro. And so there's like a pretty like explicit transaction cap for non-EU stable coins for $1 million of transactions daily in payment value when used as a means of exchange within the EU. So if it's over a million, excuse me, not a million dollars, a million euros daily, then you have to be using a euro according to Mika.

And so if you use dollars or any other non-denominated stable coins. And so I would expect that was one of the main reasons, one of many reasons why so many centralized super fintechs, you know, the Coinbase's Binances of the world just saw all the meeker regulation and be like it's too hard, it's so much. And as a result,

something we've seen in the stablecoin market are the thinner on ramps. You talked about manorium, but there are just thinner on ramps that are just like, you know, app specific. It's like, what do we do? We get dollars on chain. What do we get euros on chain?

That's the whole thing that we do. We don't do anything else. And that, to me, like then carves out like a faster way to get on chain. and the on-chain world doesn't give a fuck about Mika. The on-chain world is decentralized protocols. Like, they are whatever about Mika. They are indifferent to Mika.

That's the whole point about being on-chain. It's like, if you're on-chain, you are supra to, you know, nation-state borders and regulations. And you kind of see the whole same thing with like near AI, whereas it's like there's certain regulations, but the whole idea about being a public permissionless protocol is like, you don't really give an FF. about the regulations.

And so I'm seeing like the siloed walls of the EU go up. And then they make Manirium, you know, Mika compliant. And it's easy for Mika, for Minerium to be Mika compliant because it does one thing and one thing only, which is it gets tokenized euros on chain. And so that's permissible. But then they go straight onto NIR, where you can literally do anything,

including swapping to dollars, which is likely going to be, no offense to Eurohold. but much more of the store of value fiat currency that one would elect to use. And then going back to the whole on-chain L1 super app idea, like you have full access to the full, you know, might of on-chain applications because,

because with like the very thin on ramp onto near.com and then you have access to the rest of the world, all of a sudden, like, meika regulations just don't matter. Like sick walls that you put up guys, but like we permeated right through them. And so I think it's a funny, it's like, anecdote for why regulation is kind of silly. And it's nice that it's just like actually we'll have like an anecdote to like talk about. Yeah, no, I mean, I think, you know, yeah, anything that's like looks or resembles kind of currency controls and in this day and age is not going to, good luck, you know, kind of escaping the forces of the broader market.

You know, so I think like the least nice part about Mika is that I do think that, I mean, regardless of what, the initial goal was, I think, like, having every currency that wants to be, you know, part of the, like, global community, I think should be tokenized at this point. And that's going to take a long time before it actually happens. But, like, it's, it's super useful, frankly, that there is, like, a way to get European banks to, you know, to utilize stable coins. So, like, yeah, if you're, if the goal of the eve with that was basically to, you know, prevent people from, like, using USDC or USDT instead of euros, like, that's probably not going to, you know, have much of an effect. And and may even have like some ways where it like leaks value

because it does like actually break down the barrier of getting on chain. But if the goal is like just to make the euro more like broadly useful globally, then I think actually it, you know, it does have some benefits, right? I mean, there are going to be companies at least and probably individuals. They like have to dominate their life in euros because they live in the EU and thus like, they have exposure to expenses. You need to pay taxes in the EU. Yeah.

Yeah. So you're like, I mean, you're going to have currency risk if you're just in the dollar. And like, you know, maybe that's a risk you want to take. Maybe it's not right. it kind of depends. So like I, but if you don't, if you don't have this digital version, then like I think that you, yeah, your users are going to be like shut out, like Europeans are going to be shut out a lot of these like really great global, this global emergent, like truly frictionless global financial

system. So, yeah, I kind of agree and disagree in the sense of like, yeah, if that was, if that was the core goal, like that was kind of ridiculous. But there are at least some like nice other benefits that I think do help the EU. It's kind of like while we were so excited about genius, we're like, guys, this is, literally going to make the dollar like continue like more important like for a longer period of time right like any declining dollar dominance is going to be stemmed by the fact that like people want to denominate the internet in the dollar and this is a way that we can actually make that happen and yeah

I think that that's I mean that's the argument I would make for any regulator that's like looking at like should we have you know should we create a pathway to our own currency stable coin it's like yes if you want your users to be able to participate in this global economy then you have no choice but to do it, you absolutely should. Probably look at Genius more than Mika as far as like a way to do that. I mean, obviously, genius is still coming out line. So we'll see what it looks like when it's all done and dusted. What about confidentiality? At least previously with the pre-Mika era, one could onboard onto Binance and buy bit and then get on chain and those two actions would be separated. And so like at least on chain, like you're not connecting, you're not connecting your bank accounts.

You're still not doing that with this method. But just like, sexy. did provide some user identity obfuscation for the on-chain world. How does confidentiality work in the near world? Yeah, great question. Yeah, today was a big day, actually. Today being July 7th, we were able to push out broad support for access to confidential intents. So there's going to be a lot of the near-intense partners.

It's been on near.com for a couple of months now, but now the broader set of near-intense partners will be able to support confidential intents. So the way that works is there's actually a shard of Neer. Neer is a shard of blockchain, meaning not every validator has to process every single transaction, but ultimately it rolls into one set of blocks. And that's done primarily for scalability, but there's also an interesting aspect of that where we can have shards that have specific use cases. The one of that, like the first one actually that was shipped is this confidential shard. And so that actually works. There's basically a set of, rather a subset of validators on NIR that, um,

are running basically a parallel version of the near blockchain. They're running it within a trusted execution environment, which enforces a set of rules where these validators are not able to actually view much information about what users are doing. They can't view balances. They can't view transactions or like anything that could be de-anotomizing. The only way that that can happen is if, you know, basically, I think it's like, I believe it's like either a super majority of them basically agree

to de-anonymize a transaction. transaction. And that was done for compliance. That was done ultimately that there's a court order, you know, to de-anonomize something. This was important for, you know, getting kind of like enterprises to actually take this product seriously. So that's like one case in which they're going to be de-anonomized or that the more common case is that a user can basically have a viewing key or give a, like they can create viewing keys and then give them to different parties so that themselves and those other parties have the ability to, you know, to reveal those transactions. And so that's, That's another piece of kind of compliance there.

But by default, nobody other than you, you yourself as the user with your own viewing key is actually going to be able to view what's happening with these transactions. So initially that started off where it was literally you just like transfer your near intense assets into this private chart. And then like your balance is shielded. And you can set, you could just do a simple transfer

within that chart to any other user. And those transactions will be hidden. And then the second phase is, of course, allowing solvers to actually come in and quotes assets and then trade with users within this confidential shards so that even those trades are anonymous. So the result is that you can custody any asset that's supported on near-intense in a confidential way

and you can then trade the vast majority of those near-intense assets within the confidential shards. So it's basically a very broad, I'd say it's the broadest by number of assets and definitely a number of chains, kind of privacy product that exists in the space right now. I mean, I'm sure the answer is both, but is this mainly for just retail individual users

who want individual privacy, or is this more for enterprises who need some level of just like sovereignty over their information in order to be able to integrate something like this? Yeah, it's definitely both. I think like initially it was, you know, like the initial traction has been just near.com, which is primarily, you know, a variety of different types of retail users.

a lot coming from like kind of like the Zcash community, you know, which has been a great partner to to near intense. But increasingly, and the reason that, you know, I mean, the reason that it's designed the way that it was was to also be friendly to enterprises. Because like interestingly enough, I think they, like the first wave of people who cared about privacy and crypto is like the true cypherpunks, right, who like, you know, have like very specific ideals that they're trying to uphold. But I think the next wave is not like broader retail.

It's actually, like most of the feature requests that, you know, that I think like the industry is hearing is actually coming more from enterprises who are like, well, this is sensitive business information, right? If I'm using the blockchain to move assets around or for my customers to pay me or to like rebalance my treasury or whatever it is, like that is extremely sensitive commercial information. And, you know, I can't possibly imagine, you know, like revealing that to the whole world into anyone who's looking and you can have their agent analyzing that and like putting together really detailed competitive analysis on me. So yeah, like it very much started more as I think like, you know, designed for like, frankly, a niche of retail who are these kind of more cypherpunk, like, you know, very privacy, um, focused individuals. But like increasingly it is like the focus has very much been on, you know, enterprises and making sure that it's like actually a usable product for them. Well, the first time I heard about it, um, well, not heard about it, but just like saw it impact the market was when, uh, Zaudel, Zossi, Zashi, now Zadl integrated. integrated this. And that was where Zcash kind of got its first big pump was because people downloaded

Zashi Zadl, formerly Zashi now Zadl. And because of near intents and confidential intents, like the app just worked better. And then like near, then Zcash had his first like big price bump and then that's been part of the narrative ever since. That to me counts as an entity, not an individual who is like using and integrating near products to the betterment of their own product

in pursuit of their own ideals. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I think that's, and that kind of breaks down to the, yeah, so initially that wasn't confidential intense. So that was regular intense, regular intense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the cool part about like, yeah,

so what users were doing is they'd be like, well, I have, you know, USCC on Solana and I want Zecash and I want to shield it. So they would, you know, using Zadl, they would basically, like near Intents integrate into it. They'd get an address in Zodal where they could deploy.

posit UCC 2, then that would be swapped into ZCash and then they could, and then they could shield it, and then they could do whatever they want to after that. And so like that was, you know, that that's basically how it worked up until, you know, fairly recently. And then now, now there is confidential intents where like they can actually, they could shield, you know, quote unquote, that USCC on Solana before even leaving Solana and then swap to ZChatch within the confidential realm. So like even that initial step is kind of like lost, right? You don't even see the fact that that. On the early days with Zaudil, or Zashi at the time, that swap between USCC on Solana to Zcash, that would have been public, right? So now even that piece can be, you know,

can be basically made private. With Zashi, now Zadol, it was the hub that was obfuscated. That's once you were already bought to Zcatch, then you could shield it. So the hub, but now with confidential intents, it's the hub and the spokes. And really, there is that whole idea that, you know, you don't really get privacy unless everything is private. If, like, a healthy chunk of society opts out of privacy and they just, like, don't care, be like, ah, whatever, I have nothing to hide.

You actually make it harder for the people who are seeking privacy to seek privacy. Because, like, if there's only, like, you know, 10 people in the world who are looking for privacy, well, then, like, those 10 people don't have privacy. You actually need a very large privacy set in the broad sense. And so the fact that confidential intents is expanding privacy from just the hub of Zcash

and Zcciat to the hub and spokes. And then also just spokes independently of Zcash and just elsewhere, that to me is just like we are increasing the net privacy on the internet. Did you see Alex Carps not crash out, fake crash out on media recently? I heard about it. I have not watched it. Yeah, he basically was like getting,

I mean, he's always very animated. So that's why. the media was calling it to crash out, but to me it made perfect sense. It's just like all of anthropic and open AIs customers are just feeding these two AI super labs, all of their data, all of their information, all their alpha,

and then these companies are just taking that and turning that into products. And so they're competitive with their own user base because if their user base gives them any alpha, if they're prompt into chat, TBT or cloud, is that all useful to Anthropic or Open AI, then they're ingesting that and using that as their competitive edge, which was like a huge violation of like a social contract

that could be solved with privacy. And I actually think that's like a really big bull case for Venice or anyone doing any sort of thing that's protecting user data from like coagulating into these massive super-scaler AI labs. I don't have a question here, but I'm just like throwing that's out live. It's a good segue to, to, like, like near AI too, which I don't think I, I mean, you've brought it up a couple times. I haven't talked about it. But yeah, I mean, that this, it's a similar like similar goal there on the AI side where

the goal is to, you know, have infrastructure where, um, where AI models are run with in a privacy preserving way that also cannot actually have any like basically leak any sort of any of your prompted, like any of the context that you're putting into the model, right? Um, so yeah, you mentioned Venice who uses it as like one, one of the ways they can offer end to end privacy where like, yeah, these, so there are, and they're really users of Near AI are basically enterprises. They're like, we have to be using these models. We have ones that we've identified that we want to use, but we have really serious concerns, either because like we have compliance regulations like HIPAA or something or just, you know,

competitive, you know, concerns about like giving all that information to these model developers. Or also giving them to, I mean, open router is amazing, but they also like do have all these kind of like pretty unknown like hosters of the model. that I doubt enterprises are using too heavily, but a lot of people just see one that's like fast and cheap and use it. But like that could be anyone who's up there and they can like collect as much your information as possible, right? And so basically, yeah, like you still get the hosted,

like the whole like hosted setup of like people running GPUs for you and optimizing the entire infrastructure. But then also knowing that you have some sort of like technical way that can prevent that hoster from like actually getting access to your information and your data. So like, yeah, I fully agree. I mean, I think Alex Scarps concerns are very valid. I mean, it's funny.

It's one of those things are like, I kind of doubt that like that is even too much of a priority for open and high anthropropic at the moment, right? They're in such like hyper competition. They're just like, we need better models. But like, yeah, absolutely. They have this like complete treasure trove that they will first are using, probably just to make the models better, but ultimately will use for like competitive products once they, you know, their margins get squeezed so much that they're like, well, where else is there?

Where else can we, you know, can we expand? I wouldn't be too sure about that because Dylan Field from Figma had some problems that he said, because he was a client of Anthropic and then like they launched the design product right afterwards. And so like I don't think they're doing it like everywhere all the time, but they are definitely identifying high value products that they are seeing grow success in the market. And then like, well, we can make that independently. No, yeah, good point. I mean, like, yeah, we've seen like open eye health and like they're hiring like

investing bankers. Yeah, so yeah, for sure. They're going to go for everything. They're going to try to eat everything they can. I mean, as they should. I would work back into into your neck or the woods on the, on the near ecosystem just with like intense and everything. All the things that we've talked about, what is the way that the near ecosystem captures

value the most? We talked about there's like the growing explosion of stable, and assets, the assets that other chains and apps want to integrate with, where there's like near-intents, like kind of settling between all this. How does NIR capture all of the value that is creating with near-intense and all the just like the aggregation of everything useful in crypto? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right now it's actually very straightforward.

It's really, it's volume, right? So near-intzance the protocol, which is thus near, takes a cut from every single swap that goes through Near Intents. And so that fee varies based on the partners that integrating it. There's kind of like a whole type of revenue agreement program that exists with these different partners.

And then there's Neer.com, which takes its own fee, right? And then like just takes like the fee there. And so I think like the average is somewhere around like, you know, 10 to 20 bibs depending on 10 to 20 basis points, depending on, you know, where it's coming from. But yeah, that goes into right now, like the near House of State, which basically controls that pool and has been, at least quite a bit,

have been buying back near. And so it's pretty straightforward. It's basically like more volume that's going through near intense is going to lead to, you know, more potential buybacks of near, or at least more control by near token holders of a, you know, a growing treasury that just been accumulated from the fees that near intense takes. So, you know, I mean, look, I think ultimately there's there's a lot of ways to kind of monetize this infrastructure that'll go beyond just swaps. But right now, the North Star is pretty simple. It's like make sure that near Intents is creating enough value to all these integrators who have demand for moving between assets, whether explicitly or implicitly.

And then just monetize, you know, by taking a cut from that. So I'd say like, yeah, there are really the two parts of the business, the like near intense as, as infrastructure. And that is still the dominant one and like an absolute, you know, top priority for, you know, for everyone. Like we have a lot of really great, a great and growing number of partners that are integrating near intense. And that's going to continue. And then I do think there are some unique opportunities to create just, basically do some experiments and like run, you know, kind of like popularize some, some like newer products. So like the way that the confidential intense role had happened, I think, was like a useful demonstration of that where like it landed on neer.com first to get the experience

right before, you know, making that more broadly available throughout the network. And, you know, that can be another opportunity, you know, for near dot com to kind of capture, capture that revenue directly for, for the near ecosystem. One like idea I've been working with lately is every business model in crypto is just being an exchange. Like that is actually just the business model. I remember my, my Bitcoin friend telling me this in 20, 2021 during right after defy summer and in 2021, where like we had just finished trading food tokens and now we're trading JPEGs.

And all the bitcoins were back in that era, like kind of ruffled. They had their feathers ruffled just because Ethereum was capturing so much attention. And like, why was Ethereum capturing so much attention? Oh, because it's a fantastic exchange of literally any single asset that you could ever imagine was being traded on the Ethereum layer one. And like, what uniswap was the darling of that era.

D-Y-D-X at the time. And then, like, Ethereum couldn't scale. So the layer two is they're like, well, now you can come trade on our chain. And what was the breakout app on top of Arbitrum? It was GMX, another perp exchange. Now we have like hyper and lighter. And like, what are the biggest centralized business models in crypto? Still being an exchange.

What are stable coins for? Payments, which is still an exchange. It's trading a good for money or for, you know, being a trading pair. you have AVE and the borrowing lending protocols, but that's still like, you can argue that's a swap, right? You can still argue that's a swap. And so like any successful business model of crypto

is doing some form of exchange, which I think actually if that, if we accept that idea, which I'm not saying is correct, but I think it's still illustrative. You can point this towards near intense. It's like, oh, just near is the platform for apps and chains and issuers, Meneerium issuing Euro

gets to be exchanged with any other asset inside of any other app across the rest of the ecosystem. So like as far as I'm concerned, just near is another form of an exchange, but it's just got a little bit of its own kind of properties that carve out space for it inside of like the cryptobers.

How do you like that thesis? That's a very simple way to say, right? And that's why like volume is like what's the North Star for exchanges, like ultimately volume, right? I mean, you know, you make tradeoffs at different times to like capture users and like, you know, optimize the product, but like ultimately, you know, exchanges make money by people exchanging. And like, yeah, so you volume, you take a bit of a cut of volume and then like,

you know, as long as you're making that number ultimately go up and like continue to expand in the markets that you can kind of like ultimately create the best product and like a line up buyers and sellers. Yeah, that's what's going to make. That's what's going to make it work. And so yeah, that's it. That is, I mean, that's exactly right. That's why I was like started with like integrating more chains. And that's still part of it. It continued into like, you know, integrating industry of partners that like can you know create like have that order flow and that's still a big part of it and then yeah we want you know we want every single asset in the world that people desire it to be available on on near dot com and i mean i think that's yeah that's like that is

exploding right with like ai is also like you know agents and the different products that are coming out there i think that's going to unlock an entirely new set of you know assets that people and traders right like agents will you know are and increasingly will be you know we'll be trading and so like we want to make sure that near intense is just like providing enough value to all of those different parties that like we are the exchange in a lot as many cases as possible there'll be a volume we'll take a cut of volume and then ultimately that'll you know that'll flow back to to near beautiful kentl thanks for coming on on the show today yeah thanks for having me bankless nation you guys know the deal crypto is risky you can lose what you put in you can exchange it and maybe it goes away

but hopefully not uh this is frontier it's up for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot