I bought a bag of ZEC in July, and today I found that NEAR still has this relationship with ZEC. They basically rise and fall together, and NEAR's TVL growth is directly related to ZEC! Today I spent some time researching the current positioning of NEAR. To put it simply, first of all, we need to abandon the old notion that 'NEAR is just an ordinary L1' from the past! To put it bluntly, ZEC is responsible for privacy of your 'money', while NEAR is responsible for privacy of your 'business and entire on chain life'. If ZEC is the highly secure "private vault" in the on chain world, then NEAR is the high privacy, cross chain smooth commercial highway and intelligent operating system that is embedded outside of this vault. one ️⃣ What exactly is NEAR doing? Before I delved into it seriously, I may have had the same mindset as everyone else, still stuck in the previous cycle, simply thinking that NEAR was riding on the hot topics of AI and privacy, but in fact, that's not the case. NEAR is building an operating system for autonomous AI agents. At this point in 2026, on chain interaction has shifted from "manually trading DEX coins and doing yield" to "AI agents helping you run strategies in the background 24/7". And what NEAR needs to do is to provide these AI agents with a fast, inexpensive, and highly private underlying operating environment. We can break down NEAR's core capabilities into four major areas: ·Intelligent (Private AI Reasoning): Utilizing TEE to provide confidential computing. Simply put, it means letting AI help you run strategies and models in a "black box" where your data and trade secrets will not be leaked to any third party. ·Agent (Autonomous Agent): Supports intelligent agents with long and short-term memory, capable of autonomously calling on on chain tools and identity credentials, allowing them to fully automate tasks in isolated environments such as IronClaw. ·Economy (Cross chain Settlement and Intents): Through AI driven NEAR Intents mechanism, cross chain payments, deep aggregation of cross chain DEX, and adaptive settlement are achieved. As long as the user or AI agent inputs the 'final requirement', the backend routing network will automatically complete the fastest cross chain path fulfillment. ·Privacy (native embedded technology stack): Privacy is no longer just a blanket on a single token, but the foundation of the entire technology stack, from the private GPU computing power market, multimodal AI Cloud, to asset custody in private shards, the entire process encapsulates privacy at the bottom layer. two ️⃣ NEAR and ZEC: The two complement each other strongly! Recently, there have been many voices in the market attributing the rise of ZEC to short-term positive news from some regulatory level (such as SEC), which deviates from the essence of technology and business. The combination of NEAR and ZEC is not meant to hype up concepts, but rather to complement each other with extremely hardcore technology and ecology. The role of ZEC: Privacy oriented BTC, ZEC focuses on addressing the privacy of funds and transfers themselves (hiding transaction amounts, blocking sending and receiving addresses). It is a highly scarce on chain native privacy value storage target. NEAR's role: ZEC's privacy channel and commercial extension, holding ZEC blocked addresses, your funds are safe, but as long as you participate in on chain commercial activities with ZEC (such as cross chain DeFi, opening perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, or authorizing funds for AI agents), your behavior trajectory is still easily exposed. NEAR fills this gap precisely: Through NEAR's private sharding and cross chain Intents tracks, ZEC has gained access to confidential traffic and liquidity towards the entire chain ecosystem. Payment: When transferring funds, you will no longer expose other assets and historical activities held on your main chain. Trading: Buying and selling assets in a decentralized market, with no tracking of pending orders or transaction intentions by MEVs or public ledgers. Derivatives: When playing Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, it is difficult to establish a direct correlation between position and leverage data and your main wallet. So in one sentence, ZEC keeps your assets confidential, while NEAR keeps your entire business dealings confidential. As the ZEC scale of hosting and circulation in NEAR private shards grows, the TVL and protocol capture value of NEAR Intents will also increase, forming a two-way empowerment, which is also the key reason why they rise and fall together. Today, I silently chased up some NEAR, and I believe its main core logic lies in the following three points: Firstly, there is the "infrastructure reconstruction" in the era of AI agents. NEAR has not rolled away from decentralized computing power training, as it is not the strong point of public chains and has been proven to be fake for 24 years. Instead, it focuses on the value settlement, private reasoning, and tool invocation of AI agents. It is a blockchain operating system with native AI infrastructure capabilities. Next is the strongest landing product for chain abstraction, NEAR Intents, which is completely smoothing out the complexity of multi chain interactions. Users and AI agents no longer need to know how to navigate the cross chain bridge between ETH, Solana, and ZEC. They can directly issue intentions on the NEAR side and the solver can handle the clearing on their behalf. Finally, the narrative upgrade and cash flow accumulation have transformed from a simple "high TPS public chain" to a "privacy+AI+cross chain intention hub", infinitely expanding the ecological boundaries of NEAR. With the launch of private GPU markets, AI clouds, and confidential DeFi within the ecosystem, the actual network gas consumption and capture value of NEAR tokens will no longer be limited to the NEAR chain itself, but will come from the entire chain of intelligent agent economic networks. The combination of the above three factors will create a huge imagination space. Currently, at 3.5 dollars, it is still in the bottom range and in the early stages of the bull market. It is better to chase high and get on the car than to miss it! DYOR！