- NEAR markets Confidential Intents as “confidential by default” within its Confidential Account, but users opt into that account by toggling from their Main Account on near.com.
- Trades are executed in a private shard connected to the mainnet through a Trusted Execution Environment bridge.
- The project said the change aims to protect users from frontrunning and MEV attacks while allowing selective disclosure to regulators or counterparties.
Co-founder Illia Polosukhin described Confidential as “the default on near.com.” NEAR’s current product page says users opt in by switching between a Main Account and a Confidential Account.
Polosukhin wrote on X:
Confidential is the default on near .com
We have speed run the transformation to fully confidentiality for your onchain finances.
Free yourself from chains, gas and linked accounts today. https://t.co/CiZtszd8te
His post was published on August 29, 2026.
The feature was introduced in February 2026 and became generally available in July.
Private execution through a TEE bridge
Confidential Intents is a private shard with a Trusted Execution Environment, or TEE, bridge to the mainnet. It conceals trade parameters from the public mempool, protecting users from frontrunning and MEV attacks while preserving the ability to disclose transactions selectively to regulators or counterparties. A decentralized set of independent validators operates the execution environment.
Polosukhin described Confidential as the default on near.com. NEAR’s current product page says users can toggle between a Main Account and a Confidential Account.
In a discussion under Henderson’s post, users asked whether support for multiple access keys would be added and whether deposits could still be made to old addresses. Henderson said the multiple-access-key feature is in development. He also said deposits to old addresses would remain possible, with those assets labeled as Legacy assets.
Unlike most privacy-focused networks, the Confidential Intents shard uses Trusted Execution rather than client-side generation of zero-knowledge proofs. As a result, the user experience has effectively remained unchanged, without additional “friction.”
The mechanism runs on NEAR Intents, an abstraction system in which market makers compete to offer the best price for swaps. Under the confidential mode, core transaction information does not appear in the public mempool before completion.
According to NEAR Protocol data from July 2026, confidential transactions accounted for about 42% of the network’s total trading volume.
NEAR says Confidential Intents is designed to protect swaps from frontrunning and MEV while supporting selective disclosure. NEAR Protocol also distinguishes the mechanism from mixers. According to its July statement, regulators can access the data upon an appropriate request, which the project identified as the key difference.
Primary sources: NEAR Confidential Intents, NEAR announcement, and Illia Polosukhin.
