NEAR Co-founder: near.com Has Defaulted to Privacy Mode
NEAR has set on-chain financial privacy as default
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin stated that near.com has defaulted to privacy mode, and the team is accelerating the realization of comprehensive privacy for on-chain financial activities.
The product claims that users' asset balances, deposits, exchanges, earnings, and payment activities are only visible to the user by default, changing the model where most public chains directly expose address balances and transaction histories to block explorers, data companies, and any observers.
Public information has not disclosed the specific cryptographic architecture used for the privacy mode on near.com, making it impossible to confirm whether it employs zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, multi-party computation, encrypted ledgers, hidden addresses, off-chain order matching, or a combination of these mechanisms.
It is also undisclosed what assets are covered by privacy transactions, how many chains are supported, whether it applies to NEAR Intents cross-chain exchanges, audit access, key recovery, regulatory compliance processes, fee structures, and the timeline for mainnet functionality opening. Therefore, "default privacy" should currently be understood as a product direction and interface layer setting, rather than an extension that all historical transactions on the NEAR mainnet have been encrypted at the protocol layer.
Previously, NEAR combined AI with private computing as part of its product narrative, claiming that staking NEAR could unlock confidential reasoning capabilities, and described IronClaw as a continuously running agent infrastructure. The move to keep financial data private indicates its attempt to extend privacy from AI reasoning scenarios to balance displays, cross-chain fund flows, and payment workflows.
From a market mechanism perspective, publicly available balances and transaction paths expose large users, market makers, DAO treasuries, payroll providers, and corporate settlements to risks of front-running, transaction copying, targeted attacks, and commercial information leakage; default privacy may attract these users to direct their funds and exchange needs to near.com. The inflow of funds can increase transaction opportunities for routers, liquidity providers, and intent solvers, but decreased on-chain visibility may also raise identification costs for exchanges, compliance service providers, and risk monitoring agencies; the actual benefits to NEAR tokens depend on whether privacy features generate new accounts, asset retention, transaction volume, and staking demand, rather than being driven solely by privacy narratives.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Illia Polosukhin is one of the co-authors of the Transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need" and co-founded NEAR Protocol in 2017. Initially, NEAR did not position privacy as its sole selling point but focused on sharding, developer experience, account abstraction, and low-friction applications to establish its L1 positioning; later, it packaged cross-chain operations through NEAR Intents as an interactive model for users to express goals and competitive execution by solvers. Now that near.com has set privacy as default, it indicates that NEAR is trying to extend the product layer control over the visibility of users' financial data from "account-intent-execution-result" rather than just providing an entry point for wallets on a public chain.
In terms of capital pathways, NEAR Intents have enabled users to deposit assets from different chains, with routing and solving systems handling exchanges and cross-chain transfers; public transaction records show that this system can display the complete status of deposits, processing, withdrawals, and cross-chain transfers. If default privacy covers this process, the project needs to reallocate who can see order sizes, routing paths, transaction prices, and final receiving addresses: users gain less strategic leakage, while liquidity providers and solvers gain less replicable order information. Privacy does not automatically create liquidity; it first changes the ownership of information asymmetry; if pricing proofs, settlement guarantees, and liquidity incentives are insufficient, hidden orders may instead increase pricing risk premiums.
Historically, Monero and Zcash chose to handle transaction privacy at the protocol level, using ring signatures, hidden addresses, and zero-knowledge proofs to obscure transaction participants or amounts; Tornado Cash, on the other hand, severed fund associations on public chains through mixing contracts. NEAR's current route is closer to embedding privacy into cross-chain financial product entry points rather than requiring users to first understand the cryptographic operations of independent privacy coins. Its direct competitors include not only privacy coins but also zero-knowledge privacy infrastructures like Aztec, private transaction flows in the Ethereum ecosystem, and internal ledger experiences of centralized exchanges. In terms of industry positioning, NEAR is shifting from general L1 competition to vying for user relationships and data control over the "cross-chain fund operation interface."
Essentially, this is a transfer of pricing power: on public chains, beyond block space and liquidity, transaction data itself is also a production material that can be freely extracted by seekers, market makers, analysis companies, and competitors. Default privacy returns this data ownership to account holders, forcing routers and liquidity providers to compete based on quotes, execution quality, and credit guarantees rather than observing user positions. This shift occurs because on-chain finance has moved from retail experimentation to large funds, corporate settlements, and automated execution by agents, where transparency has transformed from a verification tool into a leak that can be arbitraged; those who can provide verifiable settlements alongside selective disclosures may gain bargaining power over the next layer of transaction entry.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Transparency reduces trust costs but also lowers information value
Asset disclosure is a function; fund visibility is the risk
Privacy is not about hiding transactions but redefining data ownership