The NEAR price rose about 23% on Monday to trade above $4, and the reason sits one layer beneath the token itself. NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service built on the NEAR blockchain, has become a routing layer for Zcash trades, and as ZEC demand surged, the volume flowing through NEAR’s infrastructure surged with it, as CoinDesk reported. The token followed the traffic, extending a run that has lifted the NEAR price roughly 82% over the past week and about 89% from its September 16 level near $2.30, per on-chain data.
The move rode the same wave that carried the broader market, with Bitcoin clearing a long-term trend level for the first time in 45 weeks the same day. But the NEAR price outperformance is its own story, tied directly to the demand for Zcash that has run through the privacy coin’s 177% monthly surge. ZEC itself gained about 3% to trade above $1,500, as the swap activity ran hot.
The NEAR price has climbed roughly 112% over the past month, accelerating on the Zcash swap-routing surge. Source: TradingView.How Zcash Swaps Lifted the NEAR Price
NEAR Intents lets a wallet trade one token for another across different blockchains without the user having to bridge or move funds between networks first. Instead of manually shuttling assets, a user states the trade they want, and a network of competing solvers fills it, abstracting away the gas, wrapping and bridging that normally make cross-chain swaps cumbersome. NEAR describes the system as infrastructure for that solver competition, and says on its own channel that Intents has processed more than $5 billion in cumulative volume since launch.
NEAR Intents is also the cross-chain infrastructure making Zcash more accessible. The market has spoken: people want shielded assets. With Intents, users can now swap native ETH, BTC, SOL, and more for native ZEC. https://t.co/LH3z1gfbxw
— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) November 16, 2025
Zcash became one of its most active use cases. Because ZEC is a privacy asset that many holders want to acquire without routing through a centralized exchange, Intents offers a way to swap native ETH, BTC or SOL directly into native ZEC in a single transaction. Consumer wallets including ZODL, formerly Zashi, and Vizor have integrated the service specifically to offer these Zcash swaps, with ZODL describing its private swaps as “powered by NEAR Intents” to connect shielded ZEC to the wider crypto market.
Daily ZEC Swap Volume Through NEAR Intents Rose Sixfold
The new element is usage, not the integration itself. The plumbing predates this rally by roughly a year: Electric Coin Company, the maker of the Zashi wallet, shipped a NEAR-powered decentralized off-ramp for shielded ZEC on August 28, 2025, added an on-ramp (“Swaps”) that October, and Vizor’s public release history referenced ZEC swaps by mid-2026. What changed is how heavily it is being used. Daily ZEC volume routed through NEAR Intents rose about sixfold over the past week, according to CoinDesk, as the Zcash rally sent traders looking for private ways in and out of the token.
The NEAR Intents Explorer showed about $29.3 billion in cumulative volume and roughly $842 million over the trailing seven days, with the Zcash wallet ZODL the third-largest referral source over the prior 24 hours at about $3.8 million across 458 transactions. That is the kind of on-chain signal that draws speculative capital quickly, which is much of what lifted the NEAR price. It also arrives against a Zcash backdrop that has been building for weeks, from the Grayscale ETF conversion to the token’s break past $1,300 toward $1,500.
Investor Takeaway
The NEAR price is riding Zcash demand, not a NEAR-specific catalyst, since the token moved because ZEC swap traffic surged through its Intents infrastructure rather than on any product launch of its own.
Why Routing Volume Doesn’t Lift the NEAR Price for Holders
The harder question is what all that throughput is worth for the NEAR price and the people holding the token, and the honest answer is that volume and token-holder value are not the same thing. Despite the swap surge, the NEAR chain took in only about $95,220 in total fees over a recent 24-hour period against roughly $38 million in DEX volume, according to DefiLlama. A sixfold jump in routed ZEC swaps shows up as enormous activity, but the fees the network actually captures from it remain modest, and there is no clear mechanism converting that routing throughput into direct revenue for NEAR holders.
Analysts’ coverage of the rally noted plainly that Intents usage does not guarantee NEAR demand, and the on-chain volume reflects activity inside the execution network rather than value accruing to the token. Bitwise research analyst Camran Khosravi framed NEAR and Zcash as “complements,” with NEAR providing the confidential cross-chain infrastructure that ZEC holders use, in comments reported by Cointelegraph, and cautioned that NEAR Intents’ total value locked can rise simply when the price of ZEC already held in the system increases, even without new deposits.
With the NEAR price deep in overbought territory after an 89% run in five days, and the report tying the move to ZEC routing published only after that advance, the cleaner read is that the NEAR price has captured a narrative, and narratives can reprice quickly.
Investor Takeaway
Throughput is not revenue, since the NEAR chain captured about $95,000 in daily fees despite tens of millions in swap volume, so the routing surge does not automatically reward token holders.
