Bankless interviews Proximity Finance co-founder Kendall Cole on NEAR's chain abstraction vision, covering intent-based user experience, RWA tokenization, confidential transactions, and regulatory compliance.
Regulation & Gov ·
NEAR Protocol is pursuing a vision where users interact with crypto without needing to understand the underlying blockchain architecture. In an interview, Proximity Finance co-founder Kendall Cole discussed how NEAR Intents connects 35 chains and enables products like Infinex to consolidate tokenized assets and confidential transactions into a single interface, presenting users with a unified account view centered on holdings rather than technical infrastructure.
The discussion covered several operational and regulatory dimensions of this abstraction model. Topics included how wallets can expand to retail users, approaches to bootstrapping liquidity and partnerships, the emergence of real-world asset tokenization, deployment of tokenized stocks on NEAR, unified applications spanning multiple chains, trading bots and payment flows, compliance strategies in response to MiCA regulation, and euro onramps into the protocol.
The interview also addressed privacy mechanisms, specifically confidential intents and private routing protocols, alongside considerations for fee capture models and the role of crypto infrastructure in exchange operations. Details on how these technical and business components integrate remain outlined in the interview segments rather than fully elaborated in available summaries.