I've seen posts bullposting about the growth potential of
$NEAR intents, so I wanted to give my own take on it.
You first have to understand why cross-chain intents even exist as a primitive. They exist to serve chains that either have no smart contract programmability (Zcash), slow finality time (Ethereum), or both.
Cross-chain intents started because people wanted to safely move value from Ethereum to other chains, but they didn't want to wait 15 minutes for source-chain finality before releasing value on the destination chain. So, intents allowed the finality time risk to be shifted from the user onto the market-maker fronting the value.
2nd and 3rd generation blockchains have sub-second finality and have minimal need for intents, which are very limited in their design space (simple swaps).
Applications and usecases on chains with fast finality benefit much more from general messaging protocols like Chainlink CCIP which can:
Send tokens + instructions in one transaction — value and data move together atomically, so the receiving contract gets both the funds and directions on what to do with them.
Chain multiple instructions in a single message — encode a sequence of actions (e.g., swap → deposit → borrow) so a multi-step, multi-chain workflow completes as one orchestrated flow.
Cross-chain lending/collateralization — transfer tokens to a lending protocol on another chain with instructions to post them as collateral and borrow against them, in one flow.
Cross-chain staking/restaking — e.g., initiate staking from an L2 while the instructions transfer and stake the asset on L1 (the Lido-style pattern).
TradFi-style delivery-vs-payment (DvP) — simultaneous currency conversion, cross-chain transfer, and settlement of a tokenized asset purchase as a single atomic operation (this is the pattern ANZ demonstrated with CCIP).
So, unless you see a pipeline of more dinocoins on dinochains getting memed into popularity, then there is very limited growth ahead for them beyond the currently popular assets.