NEAR Protocol launched what it describes as the industry's first confidential-by-default perpetual futures trading on September 17, integrating Hyperliquid's execution layer directly into near.com and perps.near.com. Every position opened through the platform is now shielded from public view by default, hiding asset type, position size, entry time, and trading direction. NEAR Protocol posted the announcement on X.
PERPS NOW CONFIDENTIAL BY DEFAULT
— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) September 17, 2026
Open a position from the account you already use, and nobody can tell it's yours.
Only on https://t.co/THkSBWMu2L pic.twitter.com/sU9oEhb3cj
The launch coincided with confidential TVL on NEAR's underlying privacy pipeline hitting $70 million. According to CoinMarketCap data, NEAR's token price surged 23% on the day to trade at $3.45, a move that also rode a broader rotation of capital into AI-linked crypto tokens.
What the confidentiality mechanism actually hides
The privacy layer runs through what NEAR calls Confidential Intents, a multi-chain pipeline that lets users fund positions from any supported chain or asset while masking the link between a trading account and its on-chain identity. Order books themselves remain visible, since price discovery requires public bid and ask data, but the connection tying a specific wallet to a specific position does not.
This design choice matters technically because fully hiding order book data would break the price discovery mechanism that makes a market function at all. NEAR's approach instead targets the specific data points that create exploitable signals: who holds a position, how large it is, and when it was opened. This mirrors a broader pattern emerging across privacy-focused DeFi infrastructure, where projects increasingly separate "what is happening in the market" from "who is doing it," rather than attempting to hide market activity entirely, which would undermine the transparency blockchain settlement is supposed to provide to other participants verifying the ledger.
The system also incorporates selective disclosure capability, allowing information to be revealed to regulators or auditors under specific compliance circumstances even while remaining hidden from the general public and from other traders.
Why on-chain transparency has hurt large traders specifically
The core problem NEAR's feature addresses is well understood among institutional and high-volume crypto traders. Public blockchain transparency, while foundational to the technology's trust model, creates specific disadvantages for large positions. On-chain bots can see pending orders and execute ahead of them, degrading the execution price a large trader ultimately receives. Public order data also makes it straightforward for other market participants to copy a profitable trading strategy once it becomes visible, eroding whatever edge the original trader had developed. Perhaps most damaging, publicly visible liquidation prices give malicious actors a target to hunt, deliberately pushing an asset's price toward a known liquidation threshold to force a trader out of their position.
Front-running of this kind has a well-documented history in DeFi through what researchers call MEV, or maximal extractable value. Searchers running automated bots have extracted billions of dollars in value across Ethereum and other chains since 2020 by detecting profitable transactions in the public mempool and inserting their own transactions ahead of them. Liquidation hunting operates on a similar principle but targets a different vulnerability: once a trader's liquidation price is calculable from public collateral and position data, other participants can coordinate price action specifically to trigger that liquidation, profiting from the forced unwind. NEAR's confidential design directly closes both attack vectors by removing the visibility these strategies depend on.
How Hyperliquid and USDC fit into the stack
Hyperliquid serves as the execution and liquidity layer underneath NEAR's privacy wrapper, giving users access to more than 50 perpetual markets with leverage up to 40x. NEAR's integration of USDC additionally enables what the company describes as inter-agentic payments in stablecoins, positioning the infrastructure for AI trading agents as well as human traders.
Hyperliquid has emerged as one of the dominant venues for on-chain perpetual futures trading, processing over $7 billion in daily volume across all markets as of early September 2026. Building confidential trading on top of an already deep liquidity venue, rather than launching a standalone low-liquidity privacy-focused perp exchange, solves a problem that has hampered earlier privacy DeFi projects: privacy features are far less valuable to traders if the underlying market lacks sufficient depth to execute large orders without significant slippage. NEAR's approach borrows Hyperliquid's existing liquidity rather than attempting to bootstrap a competing pool from scratch.
HYPE, Hyperliquid's native token, gained 10% to trade at $88.66 the same day, a move that followed Kraken's parent company Payward announcing plans to bring Hyperliquid to the US market.
Where NEAR's approach sits among other privacy DeFi projects
NEAR's launch adds to a growing category of privacy-preserving DeFi infrastructure. Ethereum supports confidential DeFi yield vaults through various protocols, Zama and Fhenix offer optional fully homomorphic encryption wrappers for privacy, and Cardano's Midnight chain has pursued what it calls rational privacy, a model balancing selective disclosure against full transparency.
Fully homomorphic encryption, the technology underlying Zama and Fhenix's approach, allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without ever decrypting it, a mathematically distinct method from NEAR's Confidential Intents architecture. Zama raised a $57 million Series A in 2024 specifically to build FHE infrastructure for blockchain applications, reflecting substantial investor confidence that on-chain privacy represents a durable infrastructure category rather than a niche feature. NEAR's entry into this space through a specific, high-demand product category, perpetual futures for serious traders, rather than a general-purpose privacy layer, represents a more targeted go-to-market approach than some FHE-focused competitors have pursued.
The confidential perpetuals feature remains restricted in the United States and Canada due to regulatory considerations, a limitation NEAR's announcement did not elaborate on further. Community members who welcomed the upgrade also noted that users remain responsible for their own tax tracking, since the confidentiality that shields a trader from other market participants does not extend to the trader's own recordkeeping obligations.
Roman Zaika
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