Why Every Multichain Builder Should Consider NEAR Intents

Building on NEAR Intents means building on something that is extremely innovative and there's a lot of potential behind it, in terms of expanding and bringing all different chains together. That is a key part of what NEAR is about, and it's critical to the people who are building on NEAR now and to the people who should be interested in building on NEAR in the future.

The person who should care is someone who wants to build at the intersection of things, as opposed to selecting a single horse as the winner. Because I think we can all agree that the way that crypto has evolved over time is that there is no single winner. The winner is multi chain, the winner is different chains for different things. The winner is different protocols for different things, very similar to how the Internet became many different protocols layered on top of each other. I think that's happening right now in the crypto space.

That's the frame I want to start with, because it changes what you're actually optimizing for as a builder. If you believe one chain wins, you build for that chain and you wait. If you believe the multichain outcome is the real outcome, then the interesting work is not on any one chain at all. It's in the connective layer between them, and that's exactly where intents live.

Abstraction Is the Whole Point

One thing NEAR has really focused on, and this is core to the vision and core to the early documentation, is abstraction. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to utilize the protocol.

The thing that has really blown my mind about NEAR is the ability to use intents for sending assets. On near.com you can just input any asset and send it out to any other asset. They call it universal send.

We've been building our own merchant system with various merchant partners, which we call AnyPay. AnyPay allows people to pay with cryptocurrencies for products and services, and we've integrated the Intents protocol in a very similar use case as universal send. It lets users choose any input currency and choose any output currency and simply send from one currency to another, abstracting the entire UX flow of swapping across chains. Because now you literally just input whatever you have and you output whatever the other person wants, including their address and your return refund address, and it just completes the swap.

So this is a swap without a swap effectively. In the background, obviously a swap is happening, and anyone sophisticated enough to know what is going on in the background can see what is happening. But on the front end, the user is just using a payments feature that very simply and easily allows them to pay from anything to anything else.

I think that is truly the future of where things are headed. We're able to stay out of the swapping equation entirely by connecting all the different protocols together.

The Amazon Comparison

The way I think about this is much like in my opinion how Amazon brings together a lot of different providers of a product. A user of Amazon can simply search whatever product they want, and then they can see all the different sellers, all the different prices, all the different reviews of those products that they actually want. They get to see all the different variants in whatever output they're searching for.

With what we're building with LeoDex and the MANE Wallet, we are effectively building the ability for users to do exactly the same thing with swaps and crypto trading and payments. When you want any crypto and you want to move it to another crypto, you're able to do so using LeoDex and our routing system by looking at all the different routes and choosing the best one. That's why our tagline for LeoDex is: "See every route. Choose the best one."

The MANE Wallet is effectively the same vision, but with a wallet. Now you've got a built-in wallet. It's an iOS app, it's a Mac app, it's a Windows app, it's a Linux app, and you are able to swap to any other crypto, pay in any other crypto, hold any crypto, and be secure about it.

We also focus on privacy, so you're able to be private about how you hold your crypto and how you use your crypto. We include shielded Zcash, and we've also implemented Confidential Intents as a core part of our model, where you can use Confidential Intents to swap with opted privacy. To be precise about it, and not oversell it: NEAR's Confidential Mode reduces public visibility of transaction details, which is not the same thing as unconditional anonymity or privacy against every party (NEAR terms, privacy policy). It's a privacy choice you can give the user, and giving people that choice matters.

NEAR Intents is not the only provider on the MANE Wallet. We effectively show the user every route so that they can select the best one, and a key part of this is showing them NEAR Intents, which ends up being one of the best routes no matter what, with many different characteristics supporting it. NEAR has proven that liquidity is not the problem. It is the technological solution, and NEAR has done a really good job of that.

What Happens When an Intent Can't Get Filled

This is the question every builder should ask before integrating anything that moves user funds across chains.

When an intent can't get filled, a few things can happen. Either no route is shown at all to begin with, or the user sends the amount they want in and out and the system looks for an intents provider. The design intent is that if that provider can't complete the swap, the funds come back to the user rather than getting stuck, but the actual outcome depends on the specific asset, provider, and failure path, so status has to be tracked and shown honestly rather than assumed.

So the user experience is meant to be a very simple swap process where they can simply select any asset they want to put in, select any asset they want to put out, and send it with the intended flow being that the swap either gets filled or gets refunded back to their address. That fill-or-refund design is what makes the flow feel safe to put in front of a normal person, and I think that is really critical to what we're building.

On the mechanics, NEAR's own 1Click documentation backs this up: the integration is outcome-focused and includes execution status tracking, automatic retries, and refund handling (1Click overview). Their SDK guide backs the same point up: it tracks whether a swap went through, failed, or came back to the sender, and a refund path is designed in from the start rather than bolted on (SDK guide).

I'd be careful how you read that as a builder. Refund handling being a supported, documented workflow is not the same as a promise that every possible transfer succeeds or refunds instantly in every case. You still need to surface status honestly in your interface and handle the failure paths. But having graceful execution and refunds designed into the protocol, rather than bolted on by you after the fact, is a very different starting point for a builder.

Why We Chose It, and Why You Probably Should Too

For features like AnyPay, we really need something that is beautifully designed, simple for users, reliable, and with great pricing. NEAR Intents has proven to be one of the absolute best ways to bring users the ability to swap securely and privately with low friction, and with a high degree of confidence that their intent will either get filled or handled through the supported refund path, backed by real support along the way.

The NEAR team is amazing about support. They're amazing about working with providers and route selectors and aggregators like us, and with wallet builders like us, in order to ensure that the user has the best possible experience. I think this is a really critical part of the equation, and that is why NEAR has become one of the top integrations that we've looked at and really spent a lot of time on, and continue to spend a lot of time on as new features like Confidential Intents come out.

This is really critical to our mission, which is democratizing financial knowledge and access for all users, and NEAR has a very good alignment with that mission while building extremely great technology.

So here's the core of it. Every protocol out there that wants to compete in the crypto space, whether it's through payments or swaps or trading or anything, I think NEAR Intents is a core part of the conversation. If you haven't integrated already, you really need to consider integrating it.

NEAR has proven to be one of the most important players in this industry, and they are quickly gaining more and more traction. It is not by accident. It is because they are building technology that's amazing, with a mission statement that's amazing, with a team that is amazing, and with a community and ecosystem that is continuously flourishing and growing.

Try NEAR, confidential intents and AnyPay -> https://leodex.io