I have heard of NEAR before and will be using this DEX thanks to Zcash now.
I think fixed amounts is bad from a privacy perspective. Should be random amounts to prevent in-out correlation between transactions.
Who runs this exchange, NEAR validators? How many of them are there?
Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works:
- Users submit intents specifying the assets they want to trade.
- Solvers scan the intent pool and compete to execute the best possible swap for the user. They source liquidity from DEXs and other cross-chain solutions, centralized exchanges, OTC desks, and private liquidity providers.
- NEAR validators secure the blockchain and validate transactions, but do not directly operate the exchange or perform swaps.
There are currently 235 active validators on NEAR. For more information, see the following link:
Very exciting! This potentially paves the way for a whole new suite of Zcash products. A relatively easy one would be a Zcash-first frontend that redirects its custom frontend fee towards for example the NSM. Or a frontend tangential to what @artkor has brought up, one that enforces standard $ZEC sizes and explains how to effectively hide t-to-z-to-t heuristics and stay maximally anonymous.
Where does the ZEC liquidity pool come from?
Cool. It would be great to learn more about why the fees are so high.
Right now a 1 BTC to ZEC swap is quoting a $5,187 USD fee, which is not clearly explained in the user interface as a fee (this is with “1% slip” set - clearly a deeper slip is happening somewhere).
What are the “deposit” and “withdraw” functions for? Is it custodial, or an LP function in some way?
Is there an explorer to browse how much liquidity each chain has, or which agents are working on trades?
How can a project’s community reduce the slippage for their currency, since there is not a clear way to LP for it like on Uniswap, THORChain or Maya?
Thanks for the info. Incidentally, the concept is cool so far, unfortunately, this still says nothing about who the owner of the deposit and withdraw addresses is.
Here’s a reference to a “Stake” action.
Action 9:
1. Stake: special action to express interest in becoming a network validator
This raises more questions than answers.
Thanks for all the great questions @hanh, @zancas, and @emersonian. I just spoke with the NEAR team, and someone will be joining the Forum tomorrow to answer your questions in detail and provide more insight into how NEAR Intents work under the hood.
One of my questions for developers of all decentralized protocols. For those who follow the crypto industry, it’s no secret that a lot of Bitcoin today is being slowed down at the CEX level due to the fact that they don’t pass AML. Therefore, that people who have sanctioned assets on their hands in transparent networks will look for alternatives. And obviously they will try to trade them for DEX, and non-SDN-list protocols will absorb such assets. The negative consequences will most likely be felt by users who unintentionally receive assets with a bad history. Do you think we, as a well-meaning crypto community, should think about this problem in some way?
That cannot be avoided. I think as long as there are solutions like this, the problem will be circumvented by this type of dex or swap. Basically, none of us knows what the predecessor did with a banknote that you get paid out at an ATM. Of course it would be good if you could do shielded transactions on https://app.near-intents.org/. But I think the problem is well solved here because it is about the fact that the transaction is not stopped and you get your liquid assets in exchange. Which brings me back to my topic exchange old zec for a new zec. Burial and rebirth.
Hi @artkor, I drive ecosystem strategy at the NEAR Foundation and here to say thank you to the Zcash community for the overwhelmingly positive reception to NEAR Intents. We have indeed thought of the AML aspect and are working with the team developing the intents protocol to implement screening measures to prevent tainted assets from being passed on to users. There will be measures to prevent them both on the smart contract (policy) level and frontend (interface) level.
Hi @emersonian, we are working on optimising the slippage here. The team is rebalancing liquidity and this should be fixed soon.
We are progressively decentralising all aspects of the intents framework, the current deposit and withdraw functions are being streamlined to make one-click swap possible directly from the wallet. Currently a sub-set of NEAR validators provide MPC custody and we are working on ways to make it fully trustless in the coming days, especially with the release of our Omnibridge tech at ETH Denver.
There will be a “stats” dashboard hopefully in the next couple of weeks that will allow users to monitor liquidity on all chains. We have recently open sourced some of the solver code and the frontend code. Next is making permissionless listing of assets possible so that anyone can list an asset on their own frontend with their own liquidity against any other asset.
At the moment the bridge is set up in a ‘proof of authority’ mode. This is an interim solution before the full integration of Omnibridge (fully trustless) is done. PoA bridge code is not open sourced yet but you can read about it here: PoA bridge | NEAR Intents
Appreciate you taking the time to fill in the details! 
It’s worth noting that the longer funds are shielded the less can be known about their source.
Also, shielding and then deshielding the same unique amount allows (possibly correct) inferences to be drawn about the funds.
This is correct.
Check out the conversation on X between @zooko and NEAR Co-Founder, Illia Polosukhin:
Here’s the link for YouTube:
