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Privacy Enabled Cross Chain DeFi
Recorded: Dec. 9, 2025 Duration: 0:34:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key players in the crypto space explored the launch of Near Intents, a project aimed at enhancing privacy-based cross-chain DeFi. The conversation highlighted strategic partnerships, significant growth in trading volumes, and emerging trends prioritizing user privacy, signaling a transformative shift in the blockchain landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Mic check.
Are you able to hear me?
Yeah.
Just checking.
Yeah, I can hear you. Продолжение следует... I think we should just wait for a few minutes.
Let's give others a chance to join.
Also I think Crononial will be joining. Thank you. Oh, I think he's here.
Ayush, can we give, can you just request, like, to speak?
We can give you the access.
Yeah, I've given him a speaker invite.
He can check now.
Yep, I think we are all set
yep yeah yeah yeah very good um so apologies by the way
uh but i'll try to keep keep it minimum it's cutting a little bit, Hashi. Like we couldn't hear the last sentence that you saw.
How about now?
Yeah, I mean, we can hear you, but there's some background noise.
But I guess it will be fine.
Yeah, man, it's tough.
There's ADFW this week, so I apologize for that.
No worries.
Yeah, I mean, GM everyone, I think we can get started.
We have enough crowd and we have everyone over here as well.
So thank you so much, Ashut, for making time.
And today we'll be talking about how we are enabling privacy-based cross-chain DeFi and all thanks to
Near Intents like the awesome product that you guys have built and yeah I mean
before we dive in like would like to start off with a round of introductions
maybe would love to know more about you your personal journey in crypto like how
did you get started when did you get started like what were you doing before
that and how did near intents happen like yeah yeah like something from you would be great yeah thank you so much rishabh and team it's it's
a pleasure to be here i've i've been admiring the work you guys are doing on the privacy front
for the past few months so excited to chat with your community and talk about what this partnership
enables uh but yeah quick intro so i I live in Calcutta, India.
I've been involved in the space for close to nine years.
I got into crypto as a hobbyist nine years ago
when I saw a bunch of my friends make a bunch of money in school.
But then I've been working with Nia for five years now.
As a head of strategy, I basically lead all things go to market product
and yeah just working across the various functions shaping near intense helping the team get the
product to market the way we thought about Nier's evolution 24 months ago was we felt that all layer
ones are playing the same game which was pvp We're trying to siphon liquidity from each other
by dishing out incentives and basically
not adding any new value to the collective ecosystem.
So we realized that in order to get a moat
and really deliver something that brings more users
to crypto, brings more capital to crypto as a whole,
we need to work on what we now call chain abstraction.
So near intense came about after our chain abstraction research 24 months ago, where
we realized that there are hundreds of layer tools, dozens of layer ones, and there will
be even more in the future.
There has to be a metal layer that aggregates experiences and assets across all these ecosystems
to create a seamless UX for users where they don't
have to go to a sex as their default on-ramp to crypto but their journey starts on chain
and that's why we came up with products like chain signatures then we launched near intense
and yeah then the rest is history got it i mean that's a very good point that you mentioned like
everyone started as a pP with James and everything.
Like there was a boom in L1, L2 space, like sometimes.
So yeah, that totally agree.
Maybe I can start with a small introduction about me
and like what we are building and we can get started
from there, like, so yeah.
Hello everyone, my name is Rishabh.
I'm here with my, you know, teammate Mitanshu
and we are building EncryptoTrade,
which is like a privacy
meta layer on top of existing protocols. So as meta, like as near intents aggregates like all these
chains for passing intents among them, we basically add a meta layer on top of existing protocols.
So you can imagine like the first product that we released was a meta layer on top of
Jupyter, which allows you to interact with Jupiter privately.
You can swap on Jupiter privately.
And sometime ago, like we recently added near intents to our application, which has been
really great.
And what we do is basically you can swap or basically execute your intent privately.
And we add that material intent, near intent process the order and then you basically
uh you know get private execution and before this like i've been uh integrated by like uh i was
working with goldman sachs i've been like a coda for all my life uh nithanshu if you want to add
anything like and then we can get started with the questions sure so i'll probably like introduce
myself a bit i've been into this space like from last three plus years to be precise.
Prior to that, I worked at Mathworks.
At Mathworks, I worked with a couple of Fortune 500 companies helping them building critical
infrastructure.
Both that went into the crypto journey from last three plus years along the pressure,
been building cryptographic systems to be precise in the
zero knowledge domain polyhomomorphic encryption yeah so that's a bit of a journey i had like from
last three plus yeah i think like now we can continue towards the space yeah yep uh so yeah
like uh the first question uh like what got near intense into the zedec space like uh that was i
think a major inflection point as you guys saw
right uh when you guys did like uh even zec was not even uh like it was really stagnant what was
the major motivation that you guys had for adding zcash onto your like intent protocol because as
far as i remember like i have seen and like integrated also in my past dev life, I have integrated work with some chain abstraction protocols, but nobody saw that Zcash will be something that's basically demanded.
Like what was your motivation? What did you guys think before doing this?
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think it was end of january early february this year when we
first integrated zcash so way before the current mania we were supporting zcash so the trigger for
us uh and actually before before i go to what the trigger and catalyst was um you can you can look
at my tweets from 2021 when i was interacting with the zcash community elia was doing events with
with zuko josh so we go way back with the zcash ecosystem we've always wanted to work together
it just came about at the right time so what happened this february there were several notices
by centralized exchanges who were threatening to deal with Zcash because of regulatory
ambiguity there was just no clarity in terms of okay yeah like do we support private stable coins
do we support private coins um is it is it permissible in certain jurisdictions so there
was a community vote i think on binance and some exchanges whether we should they should continue
supporting zcash mon Monero Dash, etc.
And what we realized was there are many teams out there who have been grinding out on the privacy front.
They're trying to engage regulators.
They have a community of token holders.
They have a community of users.
Actually, you'll be surprised to know if you guys don't already
that there's a big community of users, thousands of users,
who use Zcash as their day-to-day mechanism
for payments like people buying coffee people paying their tuition fee with zcash so for us it
was a no-brainer and then largely we've always had this vision that near intense will be the
sort of on-chain marketplace for users to trade all assets on all chains and all types of assets even off chain so we would have listed
zcash ultimately anyways just like we're listing all assets on all chains but yeah when we saw
this opportunity that okay so exchanges are delisting zcash near intense is in its nascent
stage can we service the zcash community by enabling flows from all chains and just make
it super easy for anyone to not only get into the cache but also
get out of the cache so we started developing the integration back in february and then about four
weeks ago we shipped shielded the cash support as well so now we support end-to-end shielded as
well as transparent addresses and yeah we we currently route about 10 20 of all the cash volume
and then near intense protocol actually holds close to one percent of all Zcash volume and then near intense protocol actually
holds close to 1% of the Zcash supply in liquidity so it's been a great journey.
Yeah I mean you guys are doing great in terms of the volume as well like I have seen I checked
the chart like before coming this call only and like you guys I guess have surpassed like 7 billion
in all time volume with a daily volume of like
47 million and I mean kudos to that like that's huge number when you compare to other protocols
as well and I think ZDC was a major turning point as you mentioned like with three listing of
ZDC and privacy based coins from decentralized exchanges so like did this growth actually like when zcash took off like uh what were the some things like
that you guys used or did that basically brought this growth to other assets as well because when
we are working with near intense it's a great product like i think like right now if somebody
asks me to use another product like i would not basically integrate another intent based protocol but uh
how did you channelize the zcash boom into other assets as well like uh how did that growth happen
can you uh can you share some strategies uh like what did you execute how did you execute over there
yeah it was very straightforward the zcash did serve as a good reference point for us,
where we could point to other chains and assets. We can point towards Zcash to other chains and
assets and say, hey, this is what we unlocked for Zcash. We could do the same for you guys.
But alongside Zcash, we were just looking with the Dogecoin community, SRP community, Stellar,
etc. Aptosui and it was just about
enabling seamless support for their chains on our intent system.
What we did realize was just supporting these assets on our front end will not
make much of a difference because then it's very hard to distribute a consumer
facing platform and you guys will be familiar with that already. So what we what we started working on was a one click API.
What our API enabled was for any third party front end like Trust Wallet,
like Infinex to support novel assets and chains without putting in the engineering hours
by simply supporting our API.
So what happened was Infinex, Ledger, all of them integrated with our
API, and they started serving Zcash or Dogecoin or XRP flows to their users without going through
the manual work that would need to integrate swaps for these chains. So to give another example,
Infinex actually uses Near Intense as its central sort of liquidity hub and they have the near intense version of zcash
um on their platform so this for us was the killer use case where our api ultimately made
it easier for everyone to access these assets got it so basically it was like partnering with
different players and then distributing your apis through them and i mean that makes sense as well
because uh as a standalone like front front-end facing
product you cannot scale that much so this is something as you mentioned like we are also facing
and hopefully we'll be in future we'll be having these sdks which will allow this private privacy
based uh like intent execution uh with near intent in the back end so i mean that makes sense for the
earlier teams as well like uh always tap into the distribution.
So which other guys are having.
So that makes sense as well.
Just wanted to add a sort of like a developer viewpoint to this.
So guys like who are a developer in this space just wanted to give a shout out to one click API.
The integration was so seamless. And from the implementation standpoint, if I can share a few words, you just just have to while integrating you just have to get the code from one click api it gives you a deposit
address it just transfer funds to your deposit address that's it that's everything has been
handled by the by the near-intended fraction protocol that's that's how much easier it is to
sort of like integrate monthly api to be honest like if i just sort of like calibrate the effort
or sort of like calculate how much effort it took to integrate,
we were able to integrate OneClick API in just a single day, along with all the testing
and front-end changes.
So that was amazing.
So developers, guys, do look out if you want to try implementing any sort of like a pressing
protocol to test out OneClick API.
I think we found out the idea with some data that we were digging out and we found that
this is something which will be a great addition.
It has been great with our protocol as well.
If you guys want to try it, just go to Infit.trade and you can use Near Intense privately from
there.
We have already processed on a weekly basis around more than 200k volume.
We have not even released the full product right now.
And we are getting huge attention from the community that we have.
So yeah, I mean, kudos to that product as well.
Okay, so moving forward, as with like with near, uh, crony, I guess with near, with near intent
specifically, you guys have actually sort of like realized the vision of unstoppable
private money because like your guys are enabling access to Zcash and like now, now at the next
level also has been unlocked that I can get access to Zcash in a shielded manner that
sort of like takes the vision a level up.
Would love to understand, Cronier, like from you.
What do you think, like how does one can realize privacy in crypto?
Is it just about hiding balances, just doing trading activities privately,
or hiding one's identity?
For us, it's sort of like we started with enabling users to sort of like
hide their balances. They can grab their funds and keep their funds. They can do trades privately.
And now with the help of near-end, they can bridge as well privately, sort of like move
money privately. Would love to know your thoughts. Like what was the, what were the initial privacy
focus application you guys have used? what's your roadmap with sort of like
this privacy integration or what sort of like privacy requirements do you actually see in crypto
that's a great question and and also thank you so much for the kind words we we actually look
forward to all of your feedback and everyone's feedback as to how we can improve the api and
the intense protocol based on your usage so very much appreciative of that and always grateful for the support
so in terms of our vision for privacy and and the roadmap a few things so our view is privacy comes
in many shape and form so the first thing we would look at is what sort of privacy does a particular
use case for a partner want.
So let's take a very basic example of dark pools. So if you're trading in a dark pool, people do not have this leverage to liquidate you.
People do not have a way of seeing your trades, which currently is not possible on open source,
sort of open transparent systems like hyper liquid the
the whole pitch around astor for example is that others can't see your trades they can't liquidate
you but on hyper liquid they can if you're aware so there's that angle of a practical privacy as
well then there are more deep angles of okay so on a transaction level do we want to obfuscate
addresses on the destination front obfuscate addresses on the origination point? So that's on the transaction level. Then there is privacy, optional privacy. So similar to banks in Web2 where you do not know the bank balances in the bank accounts of other account holders in the bank that you that you park funds with but you
know you do have that privacy where you can save your funds not see the bank balances of others
but when a regulator or government agency comes in and they want to investigate they can work with
the bank on figuring out what's coming and going out of a particular bank balance for any any user
so there's that optional privacy as well.
So I think all of these things combined,
there's a whole spectrum of how much privacy you want and what sort of privacy you want as a user.
So our view is we'll work on differentiated privacy.
So right now we're working on shielding all assets
on near intents.
So embedding shielding on the protocol level.
We right now support shielded Zcash, but just inside Zashi will embedding shielding on the protocol level we right now support shielded zcash but
just inside zashi will soon enable shielding via our api for the cache everywhere but then the idea
would be if as a user you want to trade bitcoin and you don't want people to know what what the
trade was you can very well opt into the shielded transactions on your intents and and do so so that
would be the first step on the ai, even AI is a very big focus
for NIR going forward as well.
We do have DCML, which is Decentralized Confidential
Machine Learning.
Although I can't share a lot about it,
I'll be happy to point you guys towards some tweets
that we put out recently.
But DCML is indeed this idea where you as a user
can protect the data that you put on a model, but then others can protect the data that you put on a model but then others
can't access the data you put on a model and you can verify the output that's been generated.
So there's a lot of stuff we're doing on the AI privacy.
Amazing.
And Nitanshu, before you move on to the next question, I was very curious that you mentioned
all these kinds of privacy that are there.
And we know that there have been discussions around Twitter as well regarding two different types of models, like Zcash, which is basically like a completely private system where you basically go and you deposit your adverts, you shield it, you become completely private.
But there's another idea where you have privacy on existing
chains like what we are doing like in the trade and there are other solutions as well but would
love to know your take like maybe in one or two sentences like uh what do you think like uh do you
think like uh these solutions also should exist or do you think like uh only complete privacy makes sense. Or it should be something in middle also works.
Oh, I think his internet is a little buggy.
I think he, no, maybe we can wait for one or two minutes.
I think he'll join soon now.
Yeah. Hey, hey, hey. Yeah i i got cut off for some reason could you
please repeat the question i'm so sorry yeah just curious like uh so there have been discussions
around zcash which is completely private and there have been solutions like encrypt or trade
which is providing privacy on existing chains so do you think like what's the better thing or uh do
you think like something in middle should exist or like the users should choose like what's your take like what kind of privacy do you
think is the best yeah i think you you've said it just now like whatever the you we want to give
this option to the users where they can they can choose what sort of privacy they want for their
particular use case so for example what you guys are enabling right now is a private pathway to move assets to another destination chain,
but do so in a confidential way.
I think that to me is indeed a very good use case where we can say that,
okay, so there's a transparent asset, which is sole.
You can move this asset privately, obfuscating the trade uh to zcash and vice versa
using encrypt or trade i think this is super normie friendly the user does not need to worry about
okay what do i do to turn on privacy it's just private by default and also on the on the zcash
front i think we there's no comparison in what you guys are doing in zcash these are just just
different approaches to the same outcome,
which is delivering privacy.
I think it would be a miss if we don't mention that privacy is a UN-recognized human right.
And I think whatever the approach is,
ultimately giving users the right to make their transactions
and make their actions private,
but doing so in a safe way where we don't onboard,
let's just say, bad actors and actors and bad faith actors to the space is indeed necessary so while it's important that we offer privacy
as a default option to anyone who wants to tap into it it's also important that
that you know should there be any bad activity we isolate that from other participants in the system.
So those mechanisms where we isolate any bad actor
and protect other users participating in the private
system is also crucial.
Kronia, as you mentioned that NIR is working towards enabling
support for shielded assets
that user can now directly can basically like get access to any sort of like shielded asset
for any token privately.
Could you maybe shed some more light on that?
Like how the user flow would gonna look like?
Do user have to let's say wrap certain funds into let's say some encrypted assets and then
sort of like use those encrypted assets to get shielded assets on other chains would you guys be maintaining the pooling infrastructure
like certain pools sort of like handling handling assets in the plain text manner and users sort of
like have certain pointers that they hold this much tokens this much amount of tokens in this
particular pool without actually revealing how much tokens they were sort of like a privacy pool
kind of like infrastructure.
We'd love to get a bit more detail around that if possible.
So actually I will not be able to answer this question right now
because we're still researching and you will see,
you will see an announcement from us sometime in January.
But one thing that we would love to do is,
and this is something we are very open to,
is onboard you guys
into the working group where we work with a few stakeholders in the near ecosystem to design a
solution um for embedding privacy on the near intense protocol given you guys already use
here intense we will definitely onboard you to the working group and in january we'll unveil the
proper sort of the full flow as well as roadmap for how we achieve
end level privacy on your intents that's perfect that sounds perfect yep i mean uh and with these
like uh different privacy solutions like have you like and the cross-chain d5 aspect as well i have
seen like other solutions as well executing sw swaps with Near Intense also does.
Do you see other types of use cases as well? And what do you think the major
users will be? Obviously, retail users are there. But do you think this will also bring in
other types of institutions as well? When privacy is integrated or basically like with solutions like encrypt working with
near uh in future like uh will this be important to the institutions and they'll be considering
getting uh like to cross-chain flows yeah that's a great question and i actually like how you guys
always frame encrypt as enabling private cross-chain d5 because dFi is much more than cross-chain spot trading
or cross-chain bridging.
So Near Intense in its current form does indeed only serve cross-chain spot trading and cross-chain
bridging.
But if you look at the real world flows, it's much bigger on the derivative front than on
the spot trading front.
So for example, if we can introduce advanced order types or new trading types on the intent system where we can
offer DCA, stop loss, control leverage, vaults, payments, agent of commerce as just intent-based
outcomes to users, I think that would be a big unlock. So in my view,
lock. So in my view, yeah, like doing more than just cross-chain spot is what the biggest
opportunity is. And I think your positioning around cross-chain private DeFi and making sure
there are these composable pieces that fit with each other. So let's say someone with the same
asset has a collateralized position on Hyperliquid and they want to do something on our way they
should be able to do all of that privately using one account so in my view that's a clear use case
and institutions would love to adopt such things as well because in in the real world all of trading
happens on dark pools on or on dark trading platforms like goldman sachs does not look at the books of of other institutions
and and you know why should this be the case on crypto so so that's that's really what we
are looking to enable with these new trading types so that's coming um in h1 where we're
introducing new order types and and there will be a lot of momentum around that got it got it
that got it got it definitely it would be pretty interesting actually like uh if you like since h1
as you guys are planning to sort of like roll it out if we haven't if we got an api for that i think
like we could just enable we could just integrate that api on interpretive content and can enable
users maybe initially solana who sort of like use the liquidity anywhere in the world, do DCS, limit orders privately at
any platform that would be like critical integration to see, to be honest.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this to me is very exciting because you guys already have a vision to enable
all forms of DeFi activities via crypto trade.
So to me, it's just a natural convergence of these use cases and
working with you guys makes a lot of sense.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So moving forward, I just wanted you to sort of like shed a bit of a light in
terms of how do you position near intent among other bridges architectures like
wormhole XRR across just wanted to give the audience like what what on fundamental differences we have with like the near-internet
architecture and this different switching architecture if you could
shed a bit of a light there from you that would be amazing yeah so like first
things first we are not competing with layer zero or wormhole or across or any
axon or any other bridging or or interop provider
there are there are ways in which we leverage them for message passing between certain chains
for chain signatures which is the mpc based signing system there are ways in which some of
them leverage near intense for the chains they don't support so the way i view near intense is
near intense sits atop layer ones layer tw layer 2s, bridges, DEXs.
It's the meta aggregation layer that aggregates any type of activity between chains, any flow of value between chains, and even off chain.
We're working on Fiat Intense, for example.
And then there's a solver system.
So there are solvers for tokens across chains with their inventory.
Then there will be solvers for FIAT that will facilitate on and off ramp
between any chain for any currency in the world.
So, I mean, our scope and our ambition
is much bigger than a single bridge provider
or a single DEX on any chain.
And our view is to basically aggregate
the best of crypto and whatever
on-chain crypto collectively has to offer
and offer it to the end users.
Because ultimately, we see the opportunity here on chain crypto collectively has to offer and offer it to the end users because ultimately we
see the opportunity here being that we to to you know credit where it's due binance and coinbase
are the best chain abstracted apps in crypto like on on coinbase you don't you don't care about you
know which chain you're trading an asset as a user you get all assets from coinbase in one account
so i think that's that's the goal we want to have is building an experience where users can
trade all assets across all chains using one account across all chains.
And then what we want to position near Intents as is it should be the default avenue to
onboard into any ecosystem and move out of any ecosystem.
Because right now, any normie or any Web2 user would go to coinbase or binance as their default
on ramp to crypto i think it's changing quite quite quickly with the adoption that teams like phantom
and teams like uh metamask and others have gained over the past few years uh but yeah like there's
a lot of work for us to do to enable these platforms to get to feature parity with sexes
and i think an intense based system with competing solvers and specialized
solvers is the best way to do it so yeah in short not competing with bridges working with them to
enable on-chain growth amazing amazing yeah i mean uh actually we have also worked like not right now
but uh two years ago we were also researching a lot on the intent based infrastructure and i think
this vision that we were having, we also wrote a research article
on ETH research.
Maybe I can share that with you on the group was pretty similar to what right
now near intent is doing.
And it has taken so long for this architecture to get perfect.
Like right now with the extreme level of abstraction there that you guys have.
And that was something that we wrote down in the article and tried to present it
when intent basically got famous.
So, I think this is the time that intents are getting executed in real time.
There are certain players but I think you guys are doing a killer job over there.
I think all this brings us to the end.
I have one other question which I think you have already answered.
Like what can you expect like can
we expect but i think you have given enough alpha uh what we can expect from near intense in the
coming time and uh so guys if you guys are listening uh stay tuned uh to follow the near
account uh any closing thoughts from here uh before ending space? Like what should the user do? Like where do you want to direct them after this?
Use encrypt.trade.
Use encrypt.trade because they already support near intense.
And but seriously, I think one alpha that everyone can take away
is we want to work more closely with teams like encrypt
to enable whatever you guys want to enable for your users.
You know, we'll take your feedback. We'll make sure you get whatever you guys want to enable for your users. We'll take your feedback.
We'll make sure you get whatever you want as functionality for your users.
So just continue using the encrypt.trade app and front-end.
And we look forward to enabling more features for your users.
You guys heard it right.
Just use encrypt.trade.
Closing thoughts from my end, basically.
So we'll be present at GatePoint.
We'll be giving some alpha over there as well.
I think you guys love what we are releasing in the near term.
And yeah, Nithanshu, anything from your side?
Or maybe we can end the space then.
I think like Kronir and Rishabh pretty much covered everything
like from the near-entrance
roadmap standpoint and the integrations with Encrypt.it, the announcement we're gonna make
during this one. I think yeah that's that's I think like you know that's the closing talk.
Anyways thanks guys for joining, thanks Kronir for...
Yup thanks thanks so much Kronir for joining for making time.
Thank you guys. It was a pleasure. Bye.
