Near Protocol (NEAR)

According to Wu, SendAI developer aryan posted that after the Drift Protocol vault was stolen, they tracked a suspected attacker address (HkG...ZES) which obtained funds via Near Intents 8 days ago, remained largely inactive, and then suddenly received a large amount of funds from the Drift vault. The address subsequently transferred/exchanged the funds to multiple suspected “money laundering” addresses, which had all received fund top‑ups via Backpack the previous day. The related funds were later bridged across chains through Wormhole to an Ethereum address, and that Ethereum address was previously suspected to be supported by Tornado Cash funding sources. https://t.co/SZHyr43AxK

How to complete your first confidential swap 👇 1. Go to https://t.co/YBUSFVdjxE 2. Deposit assets 3. Transfer to Confidential 4. Toggle on Confidential Mode 5. Go to Trade 6. Swap Confidentially

NEAR just 3x'd what a smart contract can do in one transaction. Mainnet 2.11.0 is going live and most people will miss what's actually in it. Gas limit raised from 300 TGas to 1 PGas - tripled from the original launch limit that was never changed. NEAR gas is already sub-cent, so this isn’t about cost - it’s about complexity. Smart contracts can now run 3x more logic in a single atomic call. What this unlocks: on-chain verification of complex cryptographic proofs, TEE attestation validation directly in contracts, heavier DeFi composability, and AI agents executing multi-step reasoning without splitting into multiple transactions that risk partial failure. Yield/Resume race condition fixed. This is NEAR’s unique primitive – the only major L1 where a smart contract can pause mid-execution, call an external service, and resume when it gets a response. Before this fix, if an external service (like an AI model) responded too fast, the resume could arrive before the yield was fully registered, causing the call to silently fail. Now rapid-fire yield/resume cycles work reliably – critical for AI agents calling inference models that respond in milliseconds. ETH implicit accounts now use a globally deployed wallet contract (NEP-591). Previously, when an Ethereum wallet interacted with NEAR, a full copy of the wallet contract (~300KB) was deployed to each new account, costing ~3 NEAR in storage. Now there’s one global contract replicated across shards – all ETH implicit accounts reference it instead of storing their own copy. Cheaper onboarding, the contract can be upgraded independently of node releases, and it still works the same way: MetaMask signs a transaction, the wallet contract verifies the Ethereum signature and executes the NEAR action. Transaction confirmations switched from polling to push. Previously, after you sent a transaction, your app would ping the RPC node every 1-3 seconds asking "confirmed yet?" Now the node sends a notification the moment confirmation happens. The gap between "transaction is actually confirmed on-chain" and "your app knows about it" drops from seconds to near-instant. For users this means shorter loading spinners. For AI agents doing hundreds of operations per minute this means they can move to the next step without waiting. Sub-second finality. Sub-cent fees. 1M+ TPS across shards. The gas limit was the last ceiling on single-transaction complexity. That ceiling is gone.

$NEAR : Confidential Swaps are now live. $QUBIC : DOGE mining launches on Qubic with a phased rollout. $XAUT : Tether Gold goes live on Tokocrypto. $ANYONE : Anyone Client update v0.4.9.13 is now live. $RLUSD : RLUSD goes live on Coinone. https://t.co/ALdqY9P3Lw

Tried something cool today that I think many aren’t aware of: Confidential Swaps, which just went live on @near_intents. It lets you basically swap any asset, and what you swapped, what you received, and where it went are all untraceable. You deposit into your Confidential Account, and from that moment, you are inside a sealed environment. Here’s exactly what I did (see screenshots below): 1. Deposited 2k USDC on ARB. 2. Moved 2k USDC from my main account to my confidential account. 3. Swapped 2k USDC into ETH. 4. Sent that ETH to another confidential NEAR address I control. 5. Moved USDC from confidential to main account 6. Withdraw to wallet Ok, some notes. How you use it matters. If you do as I did: deposit 2,000 USDC, swap to to 0,97 ETH, but instead withdraw instantly to the same address, an on-chain degen could still connect the pattern. The input and output remain visible on the edges, while what happens inside stays confidential. Real confidentiality comes from how you handle the flow. For example, keep assets in your account longer, withdraw to different addresses (what I did), and avoid mirroring the same amounts in and out. Like, if you put in 2000 USDC, it would be quite easy to see if you withdraw the exact same amount. If you think about it, this is what happens when you use a CEX today, but NEAR found a way to do the same onchain. Every swap you have ever done before this sits on a block explorer forever. Anyone can see the inputs, the outputs, and the route. near(dot)com Confidential Accounts break that connection completely. Inside the confidential shard, there is no public RPC, nothing to query. The ledger still verifies itself, but the path between input and output disappears. Worth checking out if you want stay onchain, and want less dependence on CEXes on near(dot)com.