What is NEAR Intents? How NEAR Intents swaps work
Solvers compete to fill your swap at the best price.
How NEAR Intents fills cross-chain swaps with competing solvers, which networks it covers on TorrentSwap, how long it takes and how your deposit is handled.
- Typical time
- About 1–3 minutes between fast chains; around 30 minutes when Bitcoin is the source, because it waits for confirmations.
- How your deposit is held
- Held briefly by the intents deposit service until a solver fills the order.
How a NEAR Intents swap works
- 01You get a one-time deposit address for your quote.
- 02Once your deposit is seen, the order is published as an intent and independent solvers compete to fill it.
- 03The winning solver delivers the asset you asked for to your address. If nobody can fill it within your minimum, the deposit is refunded.
NEAR Intents in one paragraph
NEAR Intents is a cross-chain swap protocol that went into beta on 10 November 2024, originally developed under the name Defuse. Instead of routing your coins through a fixed bridge and pool, you state the outcome you want (for example BTC on Bitcoin to USDC on Solana), off-chain market makers called solvers compete to fill it, and a smart contract on NEAR Protocol, the Verifier at intents.near, settles the trade atomically. It has no token of its own, and its documentation lists 32 supported chains, including Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Zcash, Litecoin, Cardano, Tron, TON and XRP.
What a NEAR Intents swap costs
The protocol fee charged on-chain by intents.near is tiny: 0.0001% per transaction. Most of the cost comes from the solver's price, network gas, and the fee of whichever app or API you use. NEAR Intents' own 1Click API, used by apps to request quotes and deposit addresses, adds 0.20 to 0.25% (0.01% on stablecoin routes); its own front end at near-intents.org charges 0.2%.
On TorrentSwap the amount shown already includes every one of those costs including TorrentSwap's, so you compare routes by the final amount rather than adding fees up yourself.
Custody, bridges and security
While a swap settles, your deposit is credited to a balance in the Verifier contract that, per the docs, only your account's keys can move. Assets enter and leave NEAR through bridges with different trust models: Omni Bridge (light-client proofs in, Chain Signatures MPC out), a Proof-of-Authority bridge, and HOT Bridge, depending on the chain. That bridge layer is the part of the system with the most moving pieces. The project runs a bug bounty on HackenProof and says its contracts were independently audited.
Incident history
On 1 October 2026 NEAR Intents halted services after about $3.8 million, mostly USDT, was drained from a BNB Chain hot wallet through a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the Intents contract. The flaw was patched, core services resumed within hours, deposits on some networks stayed paused for longer, and the team pledged full compensation. After a 48-hour ultimatum the attacker returned the funds in full. No public post-mortem had been published as of 22 October 2026.
Tips for swapping through NEAR Intents
Practical points from the protocol docs:
- Send the quoted amount before the deadline: late deposits are refunded, and the docs warn funds sent very late can be lost
- Always set a refund address; with an exact-input quote any extra you send comes back after the swap
- Bitcoin deposits need confirmations (the docs suggest allowing about an hour), and dust-sized BTC deposits can be delayed
- On TorrentSwap, only routes paid with a plain transfer are offered, so you never need to add a memo
Where it shines
- Widest network coverage on TorrentSwap, including Dogecoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Cardano and Tron.
- Solver competition often produces the highest amount received on large, liquid pairs.
- Also serves same-network swaps (for example ETH to USDC on Ethereum) without a wallet connection.
Trade-offs
- Slower when Bitcoin is the source asset, because deposits wait for confirmations.
- Deposits are held by the intents deposit service until a solver fills the order, and NEAR applies its own compliance screening.
Networks served through TorrentSwap
- Bitcoin
- Ethereum
- Solana
- Arbitrum
- Base
- Optimism
- Polygon
- BNB Chain
- Avalanche
- Tron
- Dogecoin
- Litecoin
- Bitcoin Cash
- Dash
- Zcash
- NEAR
- Cardano
Availability changes with liquidity. The live quote is always the source of truth: if NEAR Intents can fill your swap, it appears in the route list with its exact output.
NEAR Intents: common questions
What are NEAR Intents?
A cross-chain swap protocol built on NEAR Protocol. You state the result you want, solvers compete to fill it, and the Verifier contract on NEAR settles the trade atomically across about 32 supported chains.
Is NEAR Intents custodial?
The docs describe it as non-custodial: balances sit in the intents.near contract under your account's keys. Assets cross chains through bridges, and each bridge has its own trust model.
What fees does NEAR Intents charge?
0.0001% on-chain, plus 0.20 to 0.25% through the 1Click API (0.01% on stablecoin routes), network gas and the solver's price. On TorrentSwap all of it, and every other fee, is already inside the quoted amount.
Was NEAR Intents hacked?
On 1 October 2026 about $3.8 million was drained through a bug in its Omni deposit and withdrawal layer. Services were patched and restarted, and the attacker returned the funds in full after a 48-hour ultimatum.
How long does a NEAR Intents swap take?
Each quote carries its own time estimate. Between fast chains it is usually a few minutes; from Bitcoin it depends on confirmations, often 10 to 60 minutes.
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-10-22. TorrentSwap is not affiliated with NEAR Intents.