🔥NEAR Intents have really been on fire recently, but it's not at all "mystical"; it's all about valuable insights.

🔹Everyone knows how troublesome cross-chain transactions used to be: first you bridge over, then exchange, and bridge back, all while getting hit by various gas fees along the way. NEAR Intents @NEARProtocol has completely simplified this — you just need to say, "What do I want to do," for example, exchanging ETH for SOL on Solana, and the rest — routing, finding the best price, executing — is all handled by solvers in the network competing to do it, with the final settlement done on NEAR. Users are happy, NEAR is happy, because every cross-chain intent generates a settlement fee, which is the true value capture of NEAR.

🔹What's even more impressive is that Intents has brought non-EVM assets into the DeFi arena, especially Zcash (ZEC). Previously, ZEC's participation in DeFi relied mostly on slogans, but now Raydium has directly launched the ZEC/SOL trading pair, with a 24-hour volume of tens of millions of dollars, all thanks to Intents' seamless access. Users trading ZEC on Solana experience prices that are even better than those on centralized exchanges, with a smoothness akin to native assets.

🔹Rhea Finance @rhea_finance has seized this opportunity. It has created a multi-chain unified lending market, focusing on non-EVM heavyweights like ZEC and BTC. You can directly use ZEC as collateral to borrow USDC or USDT on Base or Solana, with interest rates significantly higher than those on EVM chains (USDC can reach 10-12% APY). There is no need for manual bridging throughout the process, with gas fees as low as around 0.3 dollars, and transactions either complete or fail entirely, executed atomically.

🔹The data looks great: Rhea now accounts for 94% of NEAR DeFi TVL, close to 120 million dollars, with a trading volume of 940 million in the past 30 days, averaging over 30 million daily. The protocol's revenue has been used to repurchase 2.5 million RHEA tokens, creating a tangible positive flywheel. More importantly, it has truly activated the liquidity of ZEC, with ZEC's TVL on Rhea reaching 6.5 million dollars, which is several times higher than traditional chains.

🔹Community sentiment is also taking off. NEAR's own engineer Evgeny directly stated: "Don't miss NEAR after missing ZEC's tenfold increase." Mert from Helius, ZachXBT from the privacy sector, and Eric Wall are all testing the cross-chain experience of ZEC, and they all express that "this is how privacy coins should be." The sentiment is visibly heating up.

🔹In short, Rhea is the strongest proof of NEAR Intents landing: non-EVM assets can finally play DeFi painlessly, liquidity is flowing in, NEAR collects settlement fees, and the ecosystem's TVL and daily active users are both soaring. Next, Rhea will also launch on Sui and Aptos, while the ConsumerFi Kinsu App also uses Rhea as a yield base, offering stable returns of 6%+ to tens of millions of Web2 users.

🔹In the era of cross-chain, it’s not about who has more chains, but about who can turn intentions into reality. NEAR Intents + Rhea have already written the answer on the chain.