NEAR is busy. Whether that volume pays NEAR holders is up to a treasury.
Most crypto trades still make you do the plumbing yourself: pick a chain, bridge your tokens, find a venue, pay gas at every hop. near:native Intents flips that. You say what you want ("I have USDC on Ethereum, I want Zcash"), and a network of competing solvers races to deliver it across chains, while you never touch a bridge. NEAR is the chain where those requests get matched and settled.
It's working. Intents handled about $4.1 billion of swaps in the 30 days to September 21, and the Zcash privacy trade has made it a favorite route.
Now follow the fees. Every transaction pays a tiny protocol fee that goes to a fee-collector account. Swaps on NEAR's own front end pay 0.2%, which goes to a DAO treasury, and partner apps split their fees 50/50 with NEAR Intents.
NEAR says this revenue can be used for NEAR buybacks, for rewards to people who lock or stake NEAR, and for other ways of managing supply, and it publishes a dashboard tracking its "path to deflation." That's a real intention. But "can" is doing the work. Nothing in the code sends a single dollar of Intents fees to NEAR holders. The fee collector is an ordinary key-held account, and the treasury is a multisig DAO whose members propose and approve payments. Whether the volume ever reaches holders is a decision people make, not a rule the protocol enforces.
Meanwhile, the token keeps its usual economics. Most ordinary gas fees are burned, 70% of them, but gas on NEAR costs fractions of a cent, so the burn is small. And new NEAR is issued at 2.5% a year to validators, no matter how busy the chain is.
So the thing to watch isn't volume. It's whether the treasury actually buys. If it starts turning Intents fees into NEAR buybacks on a schedule, and better yet writes that into the code, the picture changes fast. Until then, NEAR is a great rail with a promise attached.
Observations, not advice.