NEAR Climbs as Confidential Perps Unlink Wallets From Hyperliquid

NEAR Protocol closed at $3.16 on Sept. 17 after it switched Hyperliquid perpetual futures to confidential by default, then at $3.76 the next session, according to CoinLore daily prints. The Sept. 16 close was $2.62, a 20.6% one-day gain into the announcement.

The product NEAR is selling is narrower than a hidden trade. Deposits and withdrawals run through a private shard so a position is harder to trace back to a named wallet, while Hyperliquid’s book still sees size and side.

A Public Book Behind a Private Wallet

NEAR Protocol posted the switch at 12:57 UTC on Sept. 17: perps were now confidential by default on perps.near.com, powered by Hyperliquid. “Open a position from the account you already use, and nobody can tell it’s yours,” the account wrote.

PERPS NOW CONFIDENTIAL BY DEFAULT

Open a position from the account you already use, and nobody can tell it's yours.

Only on https://t.co/THkSBWMu2L pic.twitter.com/sU9oEhb3cj

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) September 17, 2026

CoinGecko later showed NEAR around $3.76 with a $4.91 billion market cap and $1.71 billion in 24-hour volume, up 59.3% over seven days and 116.3% over 30 days. CoinLore’s Sept. 18 session ran from $3.08 to $3.82 on $1.8 billion of volume after $1.1 billion on Sept. 17.

The fine print sat on the product page. near.com opens a dedicated Hyperliquid account for each trader. Deposits and withdrawals to that account are confidential. US persons are blocked, and the page warns that leveraged trading can wipe an account. Traders still get 50-plus perp markets with up to 40x leverage, funded from 35-plus chains, with NEAR Intents swapping collateral into margin, usually USDC.

NEAR Intents, the protocol’s official trading account, put the split in one line the next day.

Perps just got a little harder to snoop on.

Perps, now Confidential by default on https://t.co/Sz4nms4CFS.
Powered by @HyperliquidX.

Fund from any chain, with any asset you already hold.
50+ markets. Up to 40x.

The order book sees your position.
It just doesn’t know it’s… pic.twitter.com/eKYgIseCzQ

— NEAR Intents (@near_intents) September 18, 2026

“The order book sees your position. It just doesn’t know it’s yours.” That is the whole design. Anyone watching Hyperliquid can still see a live book. They are less able to map that book back to a known Ethereum, Solana, or NEAR wallet.

NEAR Spent Three Months Building the On-Ramp

Confidential perps were not a surprise add-on. NEAR told users in June that Hyperliquid would come first and that privacy would follow.

THE BUILD TO CONFIDENTIAL PERPS

1. June 9, 2026: Hyperliquid perps go live on near.com, with deposits from 35-plus chains, 50-plus markets, and up to 40x leverage. NEAR Protocol writes that confidential perps are next and that the day is “step one.”
2. July 7, 2026: Confidential Intents, already used for swaps and transfers, opens to every developer on the 1Click Swap API. NEAR says more than $1.5 billion of ZEC has settled across Intents, and that over 40% of volume on near.com used Confidential Mode within weeks of launch.
3. August 29, 2026: Co-founder Illia Polosukhin says confidentiality is the default on near.com, covering balances, deposits, swaps, yield, and payments.
4. September 16, 2026: Payward, Kraken’s parent, says it intends to deploy Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets for eligible US clients through CFTC-regulated Bitnomial, a separate and public path onto the same engine.
5. September 17, 2026: near.com says confidential TVL has passed $70 million, which triggers the first NEAR@3.33 snapshot, and NEAR flips perps to confidential by default.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, wrote on Sept. 18 that near.com now supports Hyperliquid perps, multi-chain memecoins, and equities, all confidential and non-custodial. “The product has gotten really, really good,” he said, and added that the firm owns NEAR.

How the Private Shard Screens Then Hides a Deposit

NEAR’s May 27 architecture note is blunt about the trade. Fully public chain flow shows order size, token pair, direction, and timing. That is how MEV bots sandwich swaps and how copy desks clone a whale. Dark pools in equity markets were built to stop that leak. Confidential Intents is NEAR’s version for cross-chain DeFi, with users still signing on their own device.

Execution does not use client-side zero-knowledge proofs. It uses a restricted shard.

WHAT THE PRIVATE SHARD ACTUALLY HIDES

• The room: Confidential Intents runs on a private shard with no public block explorer, no public RPC, and no public API, tied to NEAR mainnet by a TEE-based bridge.
• The clock: Permissioned validators run a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance vote with about 200ms finality, so the confidential path is meant to feel like a normal near.com click.
• The screen: Funds are checked against sanctions lists and flagged addresses at deposit. Once they pass, NEAR says it does not watch individual order flow in real time.
• The keys: Each user’s history is encrypted to their wallet. NEAR plans time-scoped view keys a user can hand to an auditor. It is not a mixer, and balances are not pooled.
• The perps extra: A dedicated Hyperliquid account sits at the far end of that path. Funding into it is confidential. The position that account opens still prints on Hyperliquid.

NEAR calls this trust-minimized rather than fully trustless. The shard’s validators are independent but permissioned. That is the cost of skipping client-side proofs and supporting ordinary DeFi actions. Passkeys replace seed phrases on near.com. Users keep control of funds until a position is open. After that, margin sits in the Hyperliquid account like any other perp.

Copy Desks Without a Wallet Label

On Hyperliquid, a public address has been a live statement of record. Trackers read open size, side, entry, unrealized PnL, and the liquidation price. Copy desks mirror those wallets. Liquidation maps treat clustered stops as a target. That is the habit confidential funding is trying to break.

The ugly version of that habit is already on the record. In May 2025 a widely followed Hyperliquid trader was run out of close to $100 million on high-leverage bitcoin longs while the positions sat in public. Wallet dashboards still advertise the same feed: pick an address, read the book, copy or fade it.

Unlinking the deposit wallet does real work against that. A known funder on Ethereum or Solana can no longer be followed, click by click, onto a labelled Hyperliquid account. Strategy copying that starts from a doxxed wallet gets harder. So does the cheap version of “this whale just bridged, so fade the next fill.”

It does less against a desk that only watches Hyperliquid itself. Size and side still hit the book. A large dedicated account can still grow a public footprint once it trades. NEAR Intents is betting the missing name is enough for the users it wants, including agents and firms that will not warehouse a strategy on a labelled chain.

Confidentiality is quickly becoming a core requirement for the industry, and NEAR is becoming the rail to make it the new default.

Alex Shevchenko, GM of NEAR Intents, in a Sept. 17 near.com release

Shevchenko’s claim is about front-running, strategy leakage, and MEV, not about a dark Hyperliquid. The sharper test, which the launch does not answer, is whether those dedicated accounts stay unlinkable once chain-analysis firms start clustering them.

$239 Billion Still Clears on a Public Book

NEAR did not build a new matching engine. Hyperliquid already was the busiest onchain perps venue, and near.com is a front door onto that book. DeFiLlama figures dated Sept. 17 put Hyperliquid at $239.2 billion in 30-day perpetual volume, about 36% of the $661.4 billion recorded across perp DEXs, with $5.3 trillion of cumulative perps volume.

PERP DEX VOLUME, 30 DAYS TO SEPT. 17

Those DeFiLlama prints are rolling 30-day totals, so they move every session. The gap is the point. NEAR is wrapping identity around a venue that already clears more than three times Aster’s volume. Liquidity, funding rates, and liquidations stay Hyperliquid’s problem. NEAR’s job is the account, the cross-chain in-ramp, and the confidential hop.

Official copy puts more than $30 billion of all-time volume through NEAR Intents, the same settlement layer that now funds the perp account. That is swap and transfer flow, not a claim that confidential perps already trade like Hyperliquid’s native UI. If the wrapper works, some of that $239.2 billion starts arriving through near.com instead of through a labelled Hyperliquid wallet. If it does not, NEAR has a privacy toggle on someone else’s book.

Confidential TVL Hit $70 Million on Sept. 17

The perps switch landed on the same day near.com said it had passed $70 million in confidential total value locked, across more than 30 connected blockchains. Hitting that mark triggered Drop 1 of the NEAR@3.33 program: 333,333 milestone tokens, claimable on near.com, locked until NEAR’s three-day VWAP holds at $3.33 or higher, then convertible 1:1 into NEAR.

NEAR@3.33 TERMS

• The gate: Eligible users needed a confidential balance above $100 and an active swap history before the $70 million snapshot.
• The cap: A 2% per-wallet limit is meant to stop a few accounts from taking the pool.
• The price lock: Tokens stay locked until a three-day VWAP at $3.33. One close at $3.76 on Sept. 18 is not three days.
• The live board: NEAR pointed to its Dune dashboard at dune.com/near/near-intents for TVL that keeps moving after the snapshot.

$70 million is a small pool next to Hyperliquid’s 30-day tape. It is large enough, in NEAR’s telling, to prove that people will park funds in a confidential balance when the click looks like a normal swap. The incentive program then ties those balances to the token. Users who kept $100-plus in the private shard now need the VWAP to print $3.33 for three days before the drop turns into NEAR. That overlay sat under the same rally the perps headline produced.

Payward Wants U.S. Names on the Same Engine

The other Hyperliquid headline that week ran the other way. On Sept. 16 Payward said it intends to list onchain perpetual futures for US clients on Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets, the protocol’s builder-deployed books. Bitnomial Exchange would deploy, own, and administer the market. Bitnomial Clearinghouse would clear. NinjaTrader Clearing would carry accounts. Only allowlisted clients could trade. Nothing in that stack is live; Payward filed it as an intent subject to approval.

Arjun Sethi, Payward’s co-CEO, said no registered US exchange or clearinghouse has deployed a market on Hyperliquid yet, and that one builder venue already holds 98% of HIP-3 open interest. Payward wants to be first “holding the keys and carrying the regulatory obligations.” Jon Pham, head of US derivatives, said a US client would open a futures account with Payward’s broker and trade new contracts on Hyperliquid’s public blockchain, cleared like Payward’s existing US crypto perps.

A US client would open a futures account with Payward’s registered broker and trade new perpetual futures contracts on Hyperliquid, cleared through the same clearinghouse that already supports the crypto perpetual contracts Payward offers US clients today.

Jon Pham, Head of US Derivatives at Payward, Sept. 16 release

Payward counted more than $85 trillion of global perpetual volume in 2025, citing CoinGecko’s 2026 perpetuals report, and pointed to Hyperliquid’s DefiLlama tape above $200 billion over 30 days. As of June 30, 2026 it held 6.6 million funded accounts across more than 190 countries and territories. That is a regulated, named, allowlisted door onto the same matching engine NEAR is trying to make harder to attribute.

The two products can coexist. near.com is closed to US persons. Payward is trying to open a supervised slice of Hyperliquid to those same persons. One wrapper strips the wallet label for everyone else. The other puts a CFTC-registered name on the deployer. Hyperliquid collects flow from both if either works.

What NEAR has to show next is volume through the confidential front end, not another close above $3. The book will keep printing either way.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a crypto trading product and a token’s price, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, trading advice, or a recommendation to open leveraged perpetual futures, to buy or sell NEAR, or to use near.com, Hyperliquid, or any related incentive program. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser or qualified derivatives professional who understands leveraged products and their local rules before acting, because 40x leverage can erase an account and some jurisdictions restrict decentralized perps. Figures and product terms come from the company pages, market data, and posts cited above as of the dates given in this piece and can change with TVL, VWAP, listings, and access rules.