Intents, Zcash, and Privacy (And Why These Are The Big Three Narratives Now...)

Transcript

And I don't like it. I don't want to live in the world where AI is focused on getting more money out of me. Like this is this is not the way how I want to live >> at par with whatever you would see in just one UI on a centralized exchange and across DeFi you have a lending protocol or per exchange. >> You know that there's even like rebalancing that happens. There's some rebalancing protocols like Everclear does like these crosschain rebalancing. Not sure if you guys are using them or heard [music] of them. We have like, you know, the centralized AI cabal and then we have, you know, the decentralized open-source AI cabal. Welcome back to the rule. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. Our goal

is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. >> We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. >> Sit back, relax, and enjoy it. [music] Guys, welcome to the show. Real quick, we've got new type saying so much uncertainty on the horizon. Government only reopen until January. More layoffs continuing to come in from AI. Trump not releasing government data. There's a lot of FUD out there, guys. But good news is we're not talking about markets today.

We're talking about the technology harsh. Alex, welcome to the show. >> Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having us here, >> guys. Near Intense has taken the entire crypto Twitter by storm because of one UI simply because you can go and trade Bitcoin to Zcash to Salana and it's such an easy way. I did it. I took some ETH from the ETH network on my ledger to the Bitcoin network. I had a whole Bitcoin instantly. It took about two minutes to show up in my ledger. It was incredibly fast. It was zero slippage. You guys are doing something right. We got a lot to talk about. Um, Harshett, why don't you give us a quick intro about what you do at Near? Uh, what your kind of main focus is. Alex, you as well. Guys,

welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much for having us, Andy and Robbie. Um, it's been a pleasure. Longtime fan of the rollup. Um, yeah, so I'm head of strategy at Neo Foundation. I've been with Neo for five years. Um, and I've been working closely with Alex and the Dfuse team um, at Scaling Ignar Intents. Uh we've been just focused on growth across distribution channels and yeah I'm happy to be on on the podcast and talk about all things Near. Over to you Alex. >> Yeah I'm Alex uh I'm a techie and also responsible for near intense uh has been building the infrastructure for blockchain for 10 years with near for five years uh launched rainbow bridge the trustless uh bridge in between Ethereum and near uh and then launched

Aurora and now near intense. know all of the projects are continuing to live and I'm happy to deliver seamless user experience to all of you. >> I think it's important to mention just some stats around near intent since both of you guys were instrumental in this launch. $4.6 billion of volume since the launch and it's only been live for a few months. Um $500 million in Zcash flows. Incredible, right? So obviously Zcash has taken the world by storm. People love the idea of privacy, shielded transactions, all of this. Previously, Zcash was this walled garden. Near intense opened this up. So, what what changed to finally unlock this kind of

traction, right? When when you guys were looking at the ecosystem of Near, the ecosystem of Zcash, finally launching this product, you were able to essentially unleash these two ecosystems. What was the and and Harsh maybe we'll we'll start with you. What was the strategy behind this product launch? What did you have Zcash in mind? What was what was going through your mind when you were thinking about the planning and the design stages of Near Intense? >> Yeah, so that's a great question and thank you so much for the kind words. Um indeed it's been a journey. Um and fun fact, um as of yesterday, Near Intense has been live for a full year. We announced Near Intense exactly a year ago at our flagship conference redacted in the past year. Um it's been fun um

seeing how far we've come as far as Zcash and and the design considerations that went into building Near Intents. Um we had this idea from day one that Near Intense should be this onchain marketplace where anyone across the world should have access to any asset that they want. We wanted to get to feature parity with Binance and Coinbase. Um that was the first goal that we had in mind because like in our view Binance is the best chain attracted app. users don't really know which chain they're on. They can get Zcash, Dogecoin, whatever with simple um cash that they just onramp through through any on-ramp. So that was the vision we had in mind and you know going down the list of chains we always felt that since we have to support all chains Zcash was

a no-brainer. the chain had Lindy it has been around and there was just a vocal community of traders and users uh that wanted it and I don't know um if you guys remember but close to a year ago there were a bunch of these um sort of notices by a bunch of exchanges as in Zcash is a risky asset um and some exchanges were even contemplating delisting Zcash um near intense around January of the year um was the first onchain avenue to support Zcash trading and even before the whole mania around Zcash started, we were supporting the Zcash ecosystem. We saw days where 1 to2 million dollars of Zcash was traded organically. Um, and yeah, over the past few few weeks and months, we've just been the top avenue to trade Zcash on

chain. So that that basically was the consideration and that said, we have the same vision. We do want to roll out more assets across all chains um and make near intense the sort of connective tissue that connects all chains and all assets um across users everywhere. Um, Alex, if you have anything to add, feel free. >> Yeah, the technology wise, the core unlock was the designing uh several um crosschain and chain abstraction primitives on the near protocol. One of them is called u chain signatures on top of which there is a a trustless bridge that is built. Uh this is like an natural extension of the rainbow bridge and this bridge is called omni bridge and omni because it connects multiple

networks and uh uh what these technologies are allowing us is to work with um with chains that do not have smart contracts or do have a strange runtimes the ones that people are usually not developing smart contracts for. And uh we see we saw this opportunity in this design that the majority of the crosschain infrastructure they're focused on uh what EVM chains and maybe extended a little bit into Solana. But if you're going to take a look at the coin market cap then you will see that the volume of Cardano trading is uh multiple times bigger than the volume of the trading on all of the L2s combined with maybe

exception of base. So like there is no need to focus on this long tail. You just need to make sure that all of the assets available. So what would be the good architecture for this? That was the core consideration and uh we are able uh with near intents to add networks pretty fast. Uh we believe that in um in just this month uh we're going to launch um six seven networks. Um and uh one of them is already launched. This is Litecoin as of a couple of days ago. Uh so we're just continue making sure that all of the assets are available for everybody.

>> One of the things that was, you know, plaguing the interop space for a long long time was the extensibility, right? You could have some uh composability and extensibility within the Ethereum ecosystem in particular, but once you started to go outside of those ecosystems, it really started to fragment. Um and and then we saw some L1s, but they they didn't have as robust of a design if they were operating across these different VMs, right? And so there was there was, you know, quite a a a rich design space in the interop landscape for this particular design.

How have you made this the near intense system so extensible, right? Bitcoin, Bcash, >> any chain, >> any chain. These are typically walled gardens, right? Yeah. And and my understanding is you need some sort of verification service at least on the destination chain in order to >> Robbie. >> Well, you still need to get some sort of confirmation from the destination chain in order to understand and confirm that your your coins did in fact arrive, right? >> Of course. >> Yeah, exactly. This is a very very good question. So, we keep all of these smart contracts available on the near blockchain and through the chain signatures. This technology literally allows these smart contracts to have private keys. these both ECDSA and EDDDSA. So they cover all of the modern

blockchains. And what it allows us to have is these smart contracts to keep control of the assets on the other chains. So that's why we don't need to build smart contracts on this networks but we actually need to move the messages of that there is a user who deposited assets into the protocol from other networks to to near um and uh uh there is a tiered approach on how we're taking care of it with some networks we would like to have a maximum uh uh kind of security in integration and for this we're doing like a super heavy lifting that was first done with Rainbow We develop a light client of the specific

network as a smart contract on near blockchain. So we can actually prove any single event that is happening on that chains. This is true with Ethereum. This is true with a bitcoin itself with zcash and this is true with a set of additional networks. Uh but not for all of the networks you are able to have like clients and it is very resource intensive to support this. So for these networks we're are going with a with an approach of multiple parties who are observing the full nodes of these networks or the RPC providers. So these parties are agreeing about the uh what is actually happening what is the event uh that happens and then this MPC

solution is used as a approval authority of the deposit of the assets. So it's like a mix of these different things. uh and obviously over time we are making it more and more robust where we can uh but we start with uh our starting point is already pretty robust. There are approximately 20 uh kind of participants in the MPC network. This is on par with projects like wormhole that have 19 guardians and uh pretty soon the upgrade to this network will lead us to 100 observers of this network. Relay, low fees, [music] lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at your fingertips.

Instant multi-chain payments. Choose any token on any chain. 75 plus [music] network supported. More than 5 million users. 8 billion plus volume processed. 70 million plus transactions. Fast, reliable, everywhere. Start swapping today only on Relay. Asset management redefined. Built on ERC7621. [music] Standardize how you launch, manage, and trade onchain baskets. This is Alvara, the standard for onchain asset management. The wait is over. The Talis [music] testnet is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. [music] And so um when it comes to the actually

because I was joking about market makers but you know intense is effectively a network of solvers uh and people that need you know that put orders in and solvers create these orders and then you know that there's even like rebalancing that happens. There's some rebalancing protocols like Everclear does like these crosschain rebalancing. Not sure if you guys are using them or heard of them. U but that's a whole another kind of problem space to solve. Harsha's laughing at me because he's definitely heard of them. Um um how do you guys solve the uh the kind of issue of okay we have you know x amount of of solvers who want to solve different you know routes they prefer to just do bitcoin and zcash or they prefer to do near soul and zcash. How do you guys kind of like create the solver

network uh that is so efficient as it is today that effectively has very minimal slippage and what appears to be very like minimal fees. you know, when I used the product uh two weeks ago, I I I think I you know, it felt like I got I paid zero fees. I don't think that's exactly right, but it's very minimal. Talk to us about the fee structure. Talk to us about the incentivization mechanism for solvers and how you kind of keep them all happy um you know with which routes that they want to solve. So um our core primitive here is that uh the only most efficient thing that you can do with uh in order to create a a very efficient market is make it open

like um it's totally known to everybody. So uh anyone is able to join and market make on on the near intense. It is an open API. Um and uh the thing that we uh but there is no implied from the protocol there is no implied trust to the market makers since we are settling all of the transactions onchain it is either it is settled or it is not. So what the protocol what the backend part of the protocol what we call a solver bus the RFQ system uh what it does it actually monitors the performance of the solvers and in case the solvers are uh you know misbehaving they're signing some kind of quotes that they are not delivering and eventually the transactions are failing uh then uh we

are either if we have a contact with the party then we are saying that like something is wrong or if we don't have a contact with the party well then they're just getting excluded out of the the RFQ propagation. So an open market with uh lots of competition here is what brings a very efficient prices and uh um if you would think of it uh these market makers are able to do lots of things. They are able to hedge their positions through contrading on the biggest centralized exchanges. They're able to hedge their positions with pers. They're able to to actually execute some OTC deals for parties who are willing to acquire a particular position and it is okay for

them to pay just like the market rate. It's just because they are earning in some other place. So all of these things literally makes near intense an aggregator of the liquidity not only for the one the liquidity that is onchain but also for the offchain or centralized venues liquidity. That's why the prices are so good and we have the stats that approximately um for the 50% of the trades that are done on the uh near intense the prices are better than on Binance and on any any centralized exchanges just because solvers are combining liquidity from multiple

places. >> Yeah, it's insane. I mean, uh, Kane put out this tweet saying that we have Kane on the show next, and he he's talking about, you know, Infinex TGE, and, you know, he he he writes that Infinex integrates near protocol intense and will soon allow shielded Zcash transactions, which means you can move funds between wallets inside Infinex without exposing your trades. And Harsha, you made a funny point, which is like Binance is the best chain abstracted app in the space. And you know, I think that's what, you know, that's what Kane's trying to basically achieve with Infinex now to kind of take down some of the uh take down some of the DeFi uh or sorry, centralized kind of parties here. I'm curious from your perspective when it comes to the uh kind of growth of NAR's intent layer as kind

of like this chain abstracted layer for the space. How do you think about this uh more broadly as far as chain abstraction goes as far as the broader growth of this like vision of you know let's take away all the power from centralized exchanges in a sense and try to build this like defi super app that infinex is doing you know what do you have to say more broadly about near's role in that in that vision >> yeah that's a phenomenal question so I yeah I do agree infinex is indeed the closest onchain representation to what a binance type uh chain abstracted app could look like if it was fully onchain and they're using near intent. So our vision is to go beyond what near intense

currently is. So in its current iteration if you go on near intense the UI or any other application that's being powered by near intents it's used for crosschain spot trading basically bridge and swap across chains of native assets. But our ambition is far bigger than uh the current iteration. So if you've seen these diagrams of concentric circles that talk about total addressable market um we believe that the near intense total addressable market is way bigger than the onchain market that we see right now. So we are currently operating in the smallest circle the innermost circle where we're trying to capture we're trying to cater to um users across various chains offering them crosschain spot trading then a bigger circle outside the current circle would be the

real world and onboarding capital from tradfi um onto onchain rails so integrating things like fiat intents um and then the final and the biggest circle which is the biggest market in the next few months and years would be the agentic economy so a thesis that I personally have and that Elia also talks about quite a quite a lot is the future of onchain orderflow generation will be agentic. So we will see more agent orchestrated and agent generated order flow than human generated order flow and intense gives us a best shot um at catering um and positioning um ourselves for that for that economy when that happens. So that's really the near ambition and the way we we're thinking

about evolving the near intense product itself is we will introduce more advanced order types more trading types. So starting with things like DCA, escrow intents, um things like stop-loss um and giving users the opportunity to express their opinion in the form of a trade or intent like derivatives is something that you'll see rolling out in the next few few months. So that basically brings us as I said earlier at par with whatever you would see in just one UI on a centralized exchange and across DeFi you have a lending protocol or pers exchange bringing all of these functionalities together into a very simple natural language driven agentic platform is is what we're trying to achieve in the next few months.

Yeah, I mean I think that we've kind of just seen the initial wave of this agentic onchain uh experimentation and and I think next year we probably see a lot more of that really really come to light. I think another big uh thing that a lot of people are excited about with what you guys specifically are building is the privacy aspect of this um when it comes to ZCAST the shielded transactions and just generally like how you guys are thinking about privacy even when it comes to like the AI stuff that that the team is doing when it comes to the intent product specifically I I know it's not always private obviously we're dealing with public blockchains here uh for for the most part what is the difference in privacy level is when I'm

doing a public blockchain transfer from like ETH network to Bitcoin network knowing that I have different addresses, different chains, different entire signature designs. You you've got like Segwid and stuff on Bitcoin and then on Ethereum you've got different types of uh transaction structures. How private is that? And then how private is like the level of I want to go from Bitcoin to Zcash in the shielded manner. Um what are the levels of privacy with the near intent product? >> So if you're trading ETH to bitcoin uh your actual trade is traceable and the connection between your wallets uh can be reproduced.

uh this is uh what we show to people in our explorer but this is also something that people are really asking for when they are doing for example some investigations of the flow of the funds and they would like to try to understand how the uh entities are moving funds uh now if we're talking about zcash uh because of the privacy features of the zcash users like now we suddenly have only one end of the transaction that is kind of known with a public history because when users are withdrawing assets to Zcash, they are able to shield their assets and then we are losing the trace of this. This is the whole premise of the Zcash's uh privacy um stance and

the important thing also to say that they besides only this feature they have an additional feature of paying for something using Zcash and and their partners and uh their partners usually are accepting stable coins for payment and what is happening during this transaction is that user funds from the shielded asset shielded address are transferred to the near intense and then they are swapped. All of this is happening publicly and then there is a withdrawal to a service but the origin of funds now is uh shielded and it is private. So I think we're getting into with the privacy aspect um we are getting finally into this um onpar world

with the traditional finance because up until now we are in this very strange situation when all of the financial transactions are available uh for everybody to see. This is very very strange. It's like you're working with your wallets that are transparent and everybody knows how much money do you have and we are I I do not think that like this is like a criminal thing. Privacy is a very very important human right and it is instilled in the traditional financial system and the only thing that Zcash and more protocols who are focused on privacy are trying to get us to is actually just be on the same level of privacy with the

traditional finance. And from my point of view, this is a a direction worth going and worth exploring. And hopefully uh all of the regulators are going to understand it that it's it's okay. Habachi provable. Trade per [music] with speed and security. Earn rewards. Visit hibachi.xyz. [music] Trading on fire. Blockchain shortcuts, templates, and widgets. Launch without friction for builders by builders. Visit enso.build. I'd love to kind of bring some of these through lines together because on one hand we have private money and then on the other hand we have agentic commerce, right? and Agentic Money. And so you

guys are kind of pushing the envelope from both of these ends, pushing towards the Aentic economy, pushing private money and making sure that it's ubiquitous onchain. And I'm just curious how these things are going to converge in your mind, right? Because I think we have like, you know, the centralized AI cabal and then we have, you know, the decentralized open-source AI cabal. And, you know, we're pushing stable coins. We're pushing private money. And I'm just curious how you you guys see and and in particular how you see Near as a blockchain for AI also a blockchain for private money and connecting a lot of blockchains together producing shielded transactions making sure that the origin of the money is private why how

important is that when we transition into more of an agentic economy can you just maybe give some examples or some use cases as to why that's significant >> so I'm going to start in harsh Maybe you can continue. But I have this very straightforward um point of view on point of view on the world. Uh there are two ways how I interact with the world. One is when I want something, I want to get some food, transportation, uh or I want to learn Chinese in five years. So there is my intent. I know what I want. I need to find a counterparty who is going to deliver this to me. And there is a second direction, second way how I interact with the world. And when I'm listening to the world, when the world feeds

information into me, this is when I'm scrolling Tik Tok, YouTube or Twitter. And uh uh at this moment in time, all of the algorithms uh in these platforms are tuned the way that uh I am actually the product uh and they are monetizing my attention and I don't like it. I don't want to live in the world where AI is focused on getting more money out of me. Like this is this is not the way how I want to live. That's why we need to have userowned AI. The AI that is protecting me that is acting on behalf of me, giving me the information that I want to get based on my deep internal knowledge and deep internal goals. At the same

time, I'm absolutely okay with paying for implementing of my intents. This is my model of the world and that's why Neo is standing on these two feet. Private AI, userowned AI and also intents that are powering the kind of implementation of the goals of humans. >> Marsha, anything to add there? >> No, not really. I mean, I think I it's really these various Legos. Privacy is the bedrock for the future of the agent economy. I think it's a prerequisite if if as a user or a developer um you don't have the choice to verify what data you put on the blockchain or what data you

put on a model. I think that's we we're living in a nightmarish scenario then. So definitely agree with everything Alex said and let's um do believe it's a prerequisite. >> Harsha uh people are pretty excited about um the near token. You know, this is like this Zcash near starknet kind of meme going around. I I fielded a question from the community here wondering how near intense um traction and adoption impacts the near token. >> Yeah, that's uh that's always an interesting one, right? So, I mean our our vision is that everything that we do has to drive value back to the near token. that that is the sole mandate for the core team that whatever products we

build, whatever value flows we onboard into the near ecosystem should drive value back to the near token. So um the near intent system is already generating cash flows. It's already generating a significant um economy um and size of economy on chain. The idea would be that down the line maybe um we would conduct buybacks of the near token. So right now the way we look at near intense is we have the opportunity to unite various ecosystems together. So you give this very very cool example of starknet u it's been a pleasure working with their team. They're one of the coolest teams out there who are trying to achieve this end game of zero knowledge scalability.

Um and has of course this background of being the Zcash co-founder as well. there's this great opportunity in front of us to connect a programmable sort of layer 2 environment with this store of value private asset um and near becomes this orchestrating medium that connects these two ecosystems together. So I believe like conventionally builders or founders have looked at um just capturing value playing PVP games. We believe that expanding the pie for crypto as a whole um is the bigger opportunity out there to capture value.

Um and we do want to capture value from the centralized custodians of users funds uh not other open source ecosystems. So that's where the value comes for the near token. But I feel like people are wondering like, "Okay, great. You have this adoption. Hyperlink was doing all these buybacks. UniS swap just announced this unification proposal like like are you guys taking the near token seriously?" Like, like what is this going to look like? How do we get this thing, you know, to start a next, you know, kind of bull cycle? And I I'm not asking you to like sit here and like, you know, pump the token, but like people want a bit more clarity as to like how the team is really thinking about it like strategically, tangibly.

Maybe you could you could provide anything there. So the design on the on the way how to properly uh bring the value back into the near token is uh something that we are working on at the moment. There are different models and different protocols are executing once again different models. There are simpler models like hyperlquid. There are more complicated models like curve is doing for example like with the VE CRV uh and uh besides all of these models uh there are also regulators and then they are also uh asking questions right so we would like to make sure that we are in a good position to deliver something that is compliant uh that is uh tangible and that is actually

properly driving value uh to everyone um in the near ecosystem and So as soon as we are going to know how uh this uh value uh appreciation mechanism is going to work uh the new token economy is going to be updated and everybody will know. If you want to know it first subscribe to my Twitter [laughter] right there. >> No I think uh that was well said. We we definitely are researching um and we'll come out with a very clear plan as to how we conduct any buybacks. uh of sorts. But um I mean I had a tweet uh the past week where I was talking about why we believe in the near revanchism

theory internally. So the idea is near has been around for 5 years now. It's a layer one that has gone through cycles. We've seen builders come and go uh with with near intense we have this opportunity to not only expand the space and on board more uh capital collectively into the space but really do something special for the near ecosystem. So indeed excited for all of that. >> Yeah. Could you could you expand upon that? What what is revanchism? Like what what is the philosophy there at near? >> So it's gaining lost ground basically. So the idea was like I fundamentally believe that all layer ones without a solid product and product market fit that acrru value back to the token will have their premiums eroded. Like no one's going to trade a layer one just

because it's a layer one that's been out there for five years. You have to have fundamental value being acrewed back to the token. good products that people want to use and people want to pay for. So that's really the core focus right now. We are a product first ecosystem instead of an ecosystem first ecosystem if that makes sense because like there's this idea that if if we build good products that have product market fit that are generating fees and is being recycled back to the token there will be an organic ecosystem that forms around the token itself uh sorry forms around the product itself. uh and a good example of that is Solana like their whole thesis um and whole approach to go to market has always been consistent with the fast chain building NASDAQ on chain and you can see that in the use

cases that are dominant and predominant on Solana wherein everything is catered towards finance 2.0 or ICM and I think that is the future we see for near as well where agentic commerce happens on near intense is the enabler and this leads to the token capturing lost ground um in the coming months. Yep. Yep. All right, guys. Well, Harshet, Alex, appreciate your time spending this live stream with us on our AI Supercycle show. You guys have been great partners, have been done amazing work in this space. Um, we're headed down to Dev Connect next week. It's going to be an absolute pleasure seeing all the builders down there in the Ethereum community. I think we're going to meet up with Lane as well down there. Um, so yeah, should be a good week, guys.

Thanks for your time on on on the show. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you for having us.