NEAR has recently officially rolled out “Confidential Intents,” a front-running prevention feature, and the market reaction has been quite interesting. Transactions are routed through private shards, so they aren’t exposed to the public mempool. In other words, it fundamentally prevents situations where someone can see your order and run away with profits through front-running.

Token prices also reacted quite a lot. After the launch news, they rose by around 17% at one point, and they also recorded a significant increase on a weekly basis. Of course, there is volatility at the moment, but the key point is that investors view this technology as a gateway for institutional capital inflows. It’s precisely targeting institutions that don’t want to expose their trading strategies on a transparent blockchain.

The interesting part is that they addressed MEV issues like front-running and sandwich attacks with selective confidentiality rather than complete encryption. They don’t hide every transaction like Monero or Zcash; instead, they exclude only the necessary parts from public view while still allowing regulatory oversight. This is the differentiator from existing privacy tokens, and it seems to be investors’ judgment that it can serve as a bridge to traditional finance.

However, the challenge is that the current base-layer fees are still relatively insignificant compared to the market cap of 17.5 billion dollars. It seems like it’s currently a stage of betting on trust in the technology and the potential for future institutional capital inflows.