- Confidential payments are now live on NEAR Protocol with Universal Send.
- Automatic cross-chain conversion ensures merchants receive their requested asset.
- All transaction details stay confidential with no on-chain sender or amount data.
NEAR Protocol has launched Universal Send, a feature that allows for private cross-chain payments across more than 35 blockchains without revealing wallet activity or transaction data.
This is a milestone that completely changes the way institutional players process transactions with decentralised finance.
Complete Data Privacy On Near
NEAR Protocol has expanded its privacy architecture by introducing Universal Send, a feature that enables users across its ecosystem to make secret payments.
With the release, $NEAR users can now transmit assets to anybody, in any token, across multiple blockchains, with transaction data kept secret by default.
Confidential payments are live on https://t.co/YBUSFVdjxE.
Pay anyone in any asset, on any chain, without exposing your wallet activity.
Introducing Universal Send. pic.twitter.com/nkt0Mxav8A
— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) May 28, 2026
This new system hides the sender, receiver, and transaction amounts completely from public block explorers.
Universal Send is a product extension of NEAR Intents, the cross-chain interoperability platform.
Built on NEAR Intents technology, Near(.)com consolidates cross-chain activities into a single account, allowing users to swap assets, execute confidential transactions, and trade peer-to-peer across over 35 blockchains.
Unlike entirely opaque privacy protocols that have come under regulatory criticism, Confidential Intents allows businesses to keep sensitive data private while yet offering auditable execution for regulators or internal compliance teams.
NEAR claims that this makes the wallet more useful not only for consumers and organisations, but also for AI agents who may need to transact without disclosing strategy or sensitive data.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin sees secret settlement as critical infrastructure as autonomous agents handle more on-chain transactions.
Cross-Chain Assets Routed Via Near
Users can now pay anyone in any asset across multiple networks easily. All you need to do is scan a merchant QR code to start the seamless transfer.
After that, the network handles the complicated cross-chain conversion automatically.
The system converts the tokens and routes them to the destination blockchain immediately.
Merchants get exactly what they’ve asked for, no manual bridge hassles.
This feature makes multi-chain swaps and decentralized exchange operations for global users easier.
Thus, modern retail applications no longer face liquidity fragmentation.
The sender sends “native” Near tokens and the recipient receives liquid Ethereum safely.
The underlying protocol manages gas abstraction across thirty-five supported external layer-one chains.
So users do not have to store dozens of native gas tokens in various wallets.
Zcash Security Model Expanded
This architecture expands the famous confidential payments model pioneered by Zcash previously.
The system now provides these stringent privacy advantages, however, to complicated cross-chain transactions.
It eliminates the need for generating zero-knowledge proof on client’s side, which takes a lot of time.
Instead, a trusted execution environment bridge connects the private shard to the main network.
The system provides institutional discretion, without compromising decentralization or processing speed.
Switching between a public account and secure private account is simple.
This development kind of solves those long standing transparency challenges across the global crypto industry.