NEAR has recently made a change worth noting: http://(near.com) now sets privacy as the default. On-chain financial activities like balances, deposits, swaps, earnings, and payments can now be visible only to yourself. Co-founder Illia has been consistently emphasizing this direction. In the past, blockchain's biggest selling point was transparency, but when it comes to everyday payments, corporate funds, and institutional transactions, having your wallet balance and spending habits visible to everyone has become a barrier to large-scale adoption. NEAR isn’t turning into a traditional privacy coin like XMR or ZEC, nor is the mainnet simply transitioning into a privacy chain. Instead, it’s building privacy capabilities as a foundational infrastructure. The roadmap: cross-chain finance + default privacy + AI Agent. In the future, when AI manages money, trades, and payments for people, if all operations are fully public on-chain, it’ll be hard to integrate into the real world. What NEAR is solving is this: money can go on-chain, transactions can be verified, but there’s no need for the whole world to know how much money you have or how you spend it. This is giving rise to a new privacy narrative for near:native.