ZEC Explosion Triggers NEAR Rally: Zcash Demand Fuels Intent Protocol Breakthrough

Zcash’s surge drove massive attention to NEAR Intents launched late 2024. ZEC trading volume exploded after October 2025. For non-smart-contract chains like Zcash, NEAR Intents provides critical decentralized trading infrastructure for privacy coin traders.

ZEC Scarcity Problem Exposes Centralized Exchange Vulnerability

The Zcash trading bottleneck reveals a fundamental infrastructure gap in cryptocurrency markets. Among familiar exchanges, only some CEX exchanges offer ZEC spot trading. This scarcity stems from multiple factors: regulatory pressure on privacy coins, delisting campaigns by risk-averse platforms, and the technical complexity of supporting non-smart-contract blockchains. When centralized exchanges dominate access to a specific asset, users face concentration risk—if one exchange experiences downtime, regulatory issues, or liquidity problems, trading becomes nearly impossible.

This centralized chokepoint became painfully apparent during ZEC’s recent rally. As price surged and trading volume spiked, users discovered that their preferred platforms either didn’t support Zcash or imposed prohibitively high withdrawal fees and lengthy processing times. For traders holding Bitcoin or Ethereum in self-custody wallets, buying ZEC required transferring funds to one of the few supporting exchanges, completing KYC verification, executing the trade, and withdrawing back to a Zcash wallet—a process that could take hours or even days, during which price movements could erase profit opportunities.

NEAR Intents emerged as the solution to this exact problem. The protocol enables users to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any supported asset directly for ZEC without depositing funds on a centralized exchange. For chains that do not support smart contracts—including Zcash, Dogecoin, Dash, Litecoin, and Monero—decentralized trading options have historically been nonexistent. NEAR Intents fills this void by abstracting away the technical complexity, allowing users to specify their desired outcome (“I want ZEC”) without worrying about the execution path.

Why ZEC Demand Drove NEAR Intents Volume

Privacy Narrative Strengthening: Growing surveillance concerns drove renewed interest in privacy coins

Limited Exchange Access: Only 4 major platforms support ZEC spot trading

CEX Trust Crisis: Users increasingly prefer self-custody over exchange deposits

Technical Barrier Removed: NEAR Intents eliminated need for complex cross-chain bridges

According to onchain data, NEAR Intents launched in November 2024 with lackluster initial volume. It only gained traction in May 2025, and after October, trading volume exploded due to strong ZEC transaction demand. However, even before the Zcash surge, NEAR Intents already processed millions to tens of millions in trading volume monthly, demonstrating that market demand exists for trading non-smart-contract cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin directly from wallets on DApps.

How NEAR Intents Executes ZEC Trades Without Smart Contracts

NEAR Intents represents a significant achievement in NEAR Protocol’s push for chain abstraction. The core concept of intents allows users to specify desired outcomes without specifying exact processes, meaning cross-chain transactions do not require synchronizing multiple chain states. The process completes off-chain and verifies on-chain, with users only receiving the final result.

The overall workflow follows a structured path. Users first submit an intent, such as “Use 1 BTC to purchase ZEC.” This intent broadcasts to the network, and counterparties receiving it provide execution proposals. The client used by the user can either automatically select the optimal proposal or let the user choose manually. Proposals compete on factors like exchange rate, execution speed, and transaction fees, creating a market-driven optimization mechanism.

Once a proposal is selected, the user’s wallet signs to form a commitment, which settles and confirms on-chain. The solver then executes the proposal, and the process completes once the user confirms their intent was fulfilled. If dissatisfied with the result, users can initiate disputes. According to NEAR Intents’ terms of service, the agreement and commitment initially reached between user and system are legally binding, with disputes potentially resolved through appeals.

NEAR Intents consists of three core components: distribution channels, market makers, and smart contracts. Distribution channels include NEAR Intents’ own frontend plus wallets, exchanges, and applications that integrated the product. Market makers here exceed traditional trading facilitation—since intents can involve shopping and other services beyond trading, they refer to any service provider meeting user needs. Contracts deployed on NEAR verify and settle transactions.

Overall, aside from on-chain verification, most NEAR Intents steps occur off-chain. If you use 1 BTC to buy ZEC, you only deposit 1 BTC into the wallet provided by NEAR Intents. After transaction completion, NEAR Intents transfers the corresponding ZEC amount to your Zcash wallet. There is no asset wrapping or complex cross-chain bridge process—it may simply be a market maker behind the scenes transferring ZEC to you at the calculated exchange rate.

Based on this not-fully-decentralized model, NEAR Intents can theoretically support trading of all on-chain tokens. Beyond Bitcoin and ZEC, coins like DOGE, DASH, XMR, and LTC—which also lack smart contract support—pose no technical problem, as long as someone is willing to take the order. The order taker could even be a CEX itself, with the benefit that you don’t need to transfer assets from your wallet to the exchange and then back out again.

Intent Protocols Beyond Cross-Chain Trading

After years of development, not being obsessed with decentralization has become one of the innovation directions in the Web3 industry in recent years. At the current stage of Web3, the main battlefield for intent-based products may still be meeting demand to buy ZEC directly with ETH from a wallet. Perhaps one day if ADA becomes popular, it could happen again. But application scenarios for intent-based products like NEAR Intents are by no means limited to this.

Meituan recently launched an app called Xiaomei to help users order takeout via AI. You enter your request in Xiaomei’s chat box, such as “a light late-night snack,” and the AI combines your needs, order history, and restaurant reviews to give you several options. You can pay and order directly without switching to the Meituan Waimai app.

If there were a similar Web3 application, it could easily integrate NEAR Intents’ API and a large language model API to achieve this functionality. For example, if I get tired while writing and want to order coffee, I could connect MetaMask to this app and use the remaining CRV in my wallet to buy coffee. The market makers mentioned above would help me find the optimal trading path and lowest-fee off-ramp channel to pay for my order. All I would need to do is confirm receipt after the delivery person brings my hot latte.

This vision extends far beyond cryptocurrency trading. Intent protocols represent a paradigm shift in how users interact with blockchain applications. Instead of manually navigating complex DeFi protocols, bridging assets across chains, and optimizing gas fees, users simply state what they want to achieve. The infrastructure handles the complexity behind the scenes, similar to how ride-sharing apps abstract away the complexity of dispatching, routing, and payment processing.

Persistence Pays: When Unfashionable Projects Find Their Moment

In the Web3 industry, there are many such imaginative ideas for the future, but few persist just because they see the future. NEAR Intents is fortunate. When it initially supported the Zcash network, it probably didn’t expect a day like this would come, but this luck actually comes from day-in, day-out persistence.

A project born when intents were still a market hotspot proved its value a year later by supporting a coin that was almost forgotten. This pattern repeats throughout crypto history. OpenSea, pump.fun, Polymarket, and even Internet Computer were not products born by following the crowd, but they all endured until their own moments in the spotlight. OpenSea spent years building NFT infrastructure before the 2021 NFT boom validated their vision. Polymarket operated in relative obscurity before the 2024 U.S. election drove billions in prediction market volume.

In an industry where hot topics can change in just a week, sticking to your track might lead to obscurity due to being “outdated.” But if you persist until the future you believe in arrives, you’ll be the brightest star on the street. NEAR Intents’ experience offers a valuable lesson: infrastructure built for genuine utility—not hype—eventually finds its product-market fit when conditions align.