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- Posted
- 2026-09-07 15:56 UTC
- First seen
- 1h ago via trade comments
- Chain
- Solana
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Other theses on this trade
NEARKAT dev followed by NEAR protocol…. and you are still fading? https://x.com/middaywake/status/2097052319137612065?s=46&t=SxKirfxEM5iPyMa-RHekbA
ZEC and NEAR are not a coincidence trade. They are a closed loop. ZEC is sitting around $1,200 with a $20B market cap after ripping hundreds of percent in three months. Grayscale’s ZCSH ETF pulled in about $460M in two weeks. That is the headline. The plumbing underneath is what matters. NEAR Intents has now routed $2.17B of ZEC all time. Last 24 hours: $14.2M. Last 7 days: $42.6M. Last 30 days: $118.5M. Last 90 days from the weekly Dune series: about $308M. That is real size moving through a permissionless solver market, not a CEX withdrawal queue. Meanwhile the Zcash network itself is actually using privacy. 4.87M ZEC is shielded, 28.8% of supply, roughly $5.9B sitting in the pools. Ironwood holds 3.89M of that after the Orchard seal and migration. Shielded transactions already printed a 59.3% share ATH earlier this year. People are not just holding a ticker. They are putting coins in the dark. This is the symbiotic piece most people still miss. Zcash without a liquidity layer is a vault you cannot spend. You buy it on a KYC book, wait, withdraw, then hope you can get back out later. NEAR Intents flipped that. Zashi and Zodl let you swap BTC, ETH, SOL, USDT and a hundred other assets straight into ZEC, then shield it. CrossPay does the reverse. You pay from shielded ZEC and the other side receives USDT on Tron or ETH on Base. Hayes said the quiet part out loud: you can send any asset to anyone on the internet from shielded Zcash using Near Intents. So ZEC becomes usable private money. NEAR becomes the rail that sells the shovels. Every one of those swaps feeds Intents volume. Intents is already at about $27.8B all time, ~$3B in the last 30 days, ~$45M in lifetime fees. The fee switch flipped in February and protocol fees buy NEAR on the open market. Capture is still thin versus gross fees, but the flywheel is live: more private settlement demand, more Intents flow, more NEAR bought. Pair data has even shown ZEC related routes eating a huge slice of Intents activity when ZEC is moving, USDT/ZEC alone has printed north of 27% of pair volume in recent snapshots. That is why the correlation trade exists. ZEC is the asset people want when they want privacy. NEAR is the execution layer that makes that privacy portable across 30 plus chains without a bridge circus. Zashi needs Intents to feel like a real wallet. Intents needs ZEC because privacy flow is sticky, high conviction, and it does not vanish when memecoins rotate. One side is unstoppable private money. The other is the universal liquidity layer that finally lets that money leave the island and come back without doxxing the user. That is not a narrative mashup. That is two products completing each other.