NEAR Intents recorded its busiest period after the Zcash team linked Zashi Wallet to the network and enabled private trades inside the app. The integration supplies a decentralized on-ramp that converts BTC, SOL or USDC into ZEC and lets owners shield balances for later private transfers. The surge touches self-custody wallet holders, cross-chain builders and compliance officers as activity accelerates around privacy-preserving swaps and payments.
NEAR Intents hides the wiring of interoperability by executing a user’s “intent” across chains. An intent is the user’s signed statement of the desired outcome—such as “trade USDC on Ethereum for NEAR on Solana”—that the protocol routes and matches through relayers, cutting failed transactions and gas fees while it handles settlement. By pushing the routing work under the hood, the model lets wallet builders concentrate on interface design and privacy features.
Electric Coin Company shipped Zashi 2.4 with “Zashi Swaps” and “CrossPay,” deepening ZEC’s privacy workflow inside the wallet. Zashi Swaps convert outside assets into ZEC and, if users choose, shield the result with Zcash’s zero-knowledge proofs; CrossPay spends shielded ZEC and delivers equal value to a receiver in the coin and on the chain the receiver selects, provided the chain is supported by NEAR, according to official docs. The company also paused Zashi’s Coinbase on-ramp because the session token requirement clashed with its privacy goals.
Integration and mechanics by NEAR
The platform is processing almost twice last month’s volume, hosting over 120,000 active addresses and clearing about 800 million USD in thirty days, bringing the lifetime total to roughly 1.8 billion USD.. The recent swap flow pushes extra liquidity toward ZEC, which can deepen order books for pairs that include the coin, while the streamlined privacy path may encourage more people to hold and spend ZEC.
The on-ramp operates without a centralized KYC gate, eroding the clear audit trail compliance teams expect for AML checks. This boosts user privacy and developer focus on UX, but it also raises oversight concerns as activity increasingly moves through shielded balances managed by intents-based routing.
The next checkpoint is rolling NEAR Intents to additional chains—teams mention Sui and Cardano—and tracking usage and volume after Zashi 2.4. Follow-up data will show whether the mix of decentralized swaps and shielding turns ZEC into a private, liquid payment method that can live outside centralized exchanges.
In practical terms, the Zashi–NEAR Intents integration creates a faster, privacy-first path to acquire, shield and spend ZEC across chains, even as compliance trade-offs and multi-chain rollout milestones determine how far this model scales.
