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