NEAR’s revenue model has been reshaped by its February 2026 fee switch, with cross-chain Intents now contributing about 85% of the network’s revenue after native execution fees collapsed over the past 20 months. The change arrives alongside a sharp move in the NEAR token: it nearly doubled over the past week, rose 178% since mid-august, and is up roughly 350% since the fee switch went live, according to the figures provided.
The price move has coincided with growing activity in privacy-oriented perpetual contracts and Zcash-linked swaps, though the available data does not establish that those products alone drove the rally. The clearer operational development is that NEAR now earns fees from Intents, a cross-chain transaction system that lets users deposit, withdraw, or swap assets without manually handling bridges, transaction routes, or gas payments across multiple networks.
Before February 2026, NEAR routed Intents transactions but did not collect a fee stream from that activity. The switch gave the protocol a source of revenue that has increasingly replaced income from ordinary transactions executed on the chain.
Intents replace falling execution-fee income
Weekly execution fees on NEAR fell 83% between January 2025 and the latest period cited, declining from about $120,000 to $20,000. The drop tracks a changing mix of activity on the network, where subsidized consumer-facing applications and relayer-paid transactions have taken a larger role.
Relayer-paid, or delegated, transactions accounted for 78% of all NEAR transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In this model, an application or relayer pays the transaction fee on a user’s behalf, reducing the direct gas spending that would otherwise generate network revenue. Delegated activity has been a dominant pattern on NEAR since 2024, suggesting that raw transaction counts have become less useful as a measure of fee-generating demand.
The result is a network whose revenue is increasingly tied to cross-chain routing rather than base-layer execution. Intents fees now account for about 85% of NEAR’s reported revenue, offsetting much of the decline in execution fees without requiring users to pay directly for each on-chain action.
That shift also changes the assets and trading flows most relevant to NEAR’s economics. Intents are concentrated in stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Zcash rather than primarily in NEAR-denominated activity. Revenue depends on whether NEAR’s routing system can provide the most competitive quote for a given cross-chain swap.
SwapKit produces an outsized share of fees
Deposits, withdrawals, and swaps are the main uses of Intents, with swaps producing the largest share of fees. SwapKit, a cross-chain swap software development kit integrated into wallets, accounts for 35% of Intents transaction volume but contributes 61% of Intents fees, according to the supplied figures.
The difference indicates that SwapKit-routed transactions are more valuable on a per-transaction basis than other Intents activity, whether through larger swaps, more complex routes, or fee structures associated with its flow. NEAR cannot identify the original wallets sending that traffic at the network level, so the protocol can measure SwapKit as a route but cannot fully map the end-user sources behind it.
Competition is also immediate and transaction-specific. Intents routing competes quote by quote with alternatives including THORChain, Maya, and Chainflip. A swap is likely to move through whichever route provides the best available outcome after accounting for price, fees, liquidity, and execution conditions. That makes revenue less predictable than a fixed fee charged to every transaction, while exposing NEAR to potentially large volumes when its routes are competitive.
Zcash-related flow is visible within this system but remains a minority of total Intents use. ZEC represents 9% of Intents transaction volume. ZODL’s share of Intents fees doubled in September to 16%, showing that privacy-focused routes can generate meaningful fee income even without dominating overall transaction volume.
Confidential deposits rise after perpetuals launch
Capital held in “confidential Intents” increased from $28 million in mid-august to $131 million after privacy-focused perpetual contracts launched. Roughly half of that total, or about $65 million, consists of wrapped NEAR deposited into a points program funded by staking yield.
After removing the wrapped NEAR component, the figures indicate approximately $65 million in external confidential deposits. That distinction limits how much of the headline increase can be treated as fresh third-party capital entering the privacy-focused system. It also shows that incentives connected to NEAR staking remain an important part of the product’s current balance sheet.
The confidential products are designed to limit public visibility into transaction details and asset flows through hardware-backed privacy infrastructure, according to the supplied description. Such systems typically rely on trusted execution environments, which isolate computation from the broader operating environment. Their appeal depends on users accepting the security assumptions of that hardware model alongside the cryptographic protections used by the application.
Lower execution demand reduces token burn
The decline in ordinary execution fees has also reduced NEAR’s fee-related token burn. Burned NEAR fell from 100,000 tokens in January 2025 to 20,000 in August 2026, while the current monthly burn rate is estimated at 0.7%.
The lower burn reflects the same underlying change visible in transaction activity: fewer revenue-generating execution fees mean fewer tokens removed through that mechanism. Illia Polosukhin, NEAR’s co-founder, has argued that token burning is a poor way to manage project resources over the long term and has proposed moving toward a fixed token supply over the coming years.
The supplied material also says fees collected through the new Intents routes are directed toward open-market purchases of NEAR. If maintained, that design would connect Intents usage more directly to demand for the token than the earlier execution-fee model, though the scale of any effect would depend on route volumes, fee income, market liquidity, and the exact implementation of the purchase program.
NEAR’s AI strategy remains outside the measurable part of this picture. NEAR AI Cloud has not published revenue, customer counts, GPU capacity, or a defined mechanism linking its activity to the token, leaving Intents fees as the only quantified revenue driver in the figures available. For now, NEAR’s changing economics are being defined less by consumer transaction volume or AI ambitions than by its ability to win cross-chain swap routes and collect fees from them.
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