NEAR Eats the Week: 80% Gain, $29.3B in Intents Volume
- NEAR traded around $4.29 on Monday, up 78.2% over seven days and 22% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko — outpacing a total crypto market cap that rose roughly 6% over the same span.
- NEAR Intents, the cross-chain swap system where market makers compete to execute user requests, showed about $29.3 billion in cumulative volume and $842 million over the past seven days on its explorer.
- Privacy is doing the heavy lifting: Near said deposits and withdrawals for perp futures trading through near.com are now confidential by default, obscuring the link between a trader's funding wallet and a dedicated Hyperliquid trading account. Confidential TVL crossed $70 million, triggering the first snapshot under the NEAR@3.33 incentive program.
- Zcash wallet ZODL was the third-largest referral source by volume, generating about $3.8 million across 458 transactions in 24 hours, with one ZEC swap worth roughly $613,000 among the largest.
Bitwise's Camran Khosravi called Near and Zcash "complements" — but also cautioned that NEAR Intents' TVL can rise simply because the price of ZEC already sitting inside the system goes up, not because new deposits arrived. Read that twice before you ape the chart.
ZetaChain Votes to Kill Its L1 and Chase AI on Solana
- Governance proposal 68 passed with 99.4% support and 58% participation, clearing the 40% quorum. ZETA becomes an SPL token on Solana via a 1:1 conversion, same ticker, same supply.
- The stated reason is blunt: running a Cosmos SDK-based L1 "no longer supports its focus on Anuma," its privacy-focused AI application. Resources shift from chain maintenance to Anuma and its Private Memory Layer, which lets users carry encrypted context across AI models.
- The vote doesn't trigger an immediate shutdown. Core contributors will submit a second proposal covering withdrawal windows, snapshot height, shutdown timetable, token claims, and exchange conversion. Validators keep running and staking rewards continue during the transition.
- ZetaChain raised $27 million in 2023 from Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, Human Capital, and Sky9 Capital to build the L1 it's now abandoning.
Another standalone chain folds its tent to rebrand as an AI play. BounceBit and Harmony have already run this playbook. "We're pivoting to AI" is the new "we're pivoting to NFTs" — sometimes genuine, often a face-saving exit.
OCC Opens Three Bank Doors to Stablecoins and AI Agents
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency opened three regulatory doors relevant to stablecoins and AI agents, per PYMNTS. Details are thin from the headline alone, but the direction is unmistakable: banks are being given a path into both.
- This lands alongside a broader US regulatory sprint. The CFTC filed "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets" with OIRA (RIN 3038-AF80, received Sept. 17), a prerule stage action, two days after the Clarity Act failed a Senate procedural vote.
- The CFTC also published a no-action position for passive software developers connecting users to registered derivatives firms, and the SEC issued an "innovation exemption" giving qualifying platforms a five-year path to offer onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks without registering as securities exchanges.
Congress couldn't pass market structure, so the agencies are writing it themselves — a timeline measured in quarters, not weeks. Meanwhile Fairshake is reportedly planning a $30 million ad blitz against Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Democracy, but make it a PAC.
The Agent Stack Is Standardizing — and Getting Audited
- Open Responses, initiated by OpenAI and built by the open source community with Hugging Face backing, is a new open inference standard based on the Responses API, designed for agentic workloads. The pitch: Chat Completions was built for turn-based chat, and agents that reason, plan, and act over long horizons have outgrown it.
- NVIDIA released Cosmos Reason 2, an open reasoning vision-language model for physical AI, topping the Physical AI Bench and Physical Reasoning leaderboards as the #1 open model for visual understanding, with 2B and 8B sizes and 256K input tokens.
- On the security side, a new arXiv paper describes "Loopjacking": a human approves operation A, but mutable workflow state or misrepresentation causes the system to execute operation B. Researchers reproduced post-approval substitution in seven Agno AgentOS releases (through 3.0.9) and 12 versions of a LangGraph Agent Server composition (through 0.14.0), and representation mismatch in OpenClaw 2026.2.23 (rejected in 2026.2.24). OpenAI Agents SDK 0.22.x was a negative control.
- The UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, in its first thematic brief, urged governments to rein in AI agents before risks are fully understood.
Human-in-the-loop approval is treated as the last security boundary before an agent does something consequential. This paper says that boundary is often decorative. If you're building agent payments on-chain, that's not a footnote — that's the whole ballgame.
Markets: Bitcoin Taps $85K, Shorts Get Carried Out
- Bitcoin briefly climbed above $85,000 Monday for the first time since January, up more than 5% in 24 hours, though still roughly 32.5% below its October all-time high near $126,000.
- Of more than $750 million in crypto positions liquidated over 24 hours, $648.3 million were shorts, per CoinGlass. Bitcoin positions accounted for $360.7 million, with the largest single liquidation on Binance's BTCUSDT market at $11.3 million.
- ETH rose around 5.6% to $2,717, XRP gained 7.8% to $1.49, and SOL climbed 7.2% to $115.75.
- Context: Bitcoin is up 44% in Q3, its best quarter since late 2024, while gold added 8.7% and the Nasdaq just 2%, per CoinDesk. Brent crude hit a half-month low and the 10-year Treasury yield fell back below 5%.
The market absorbed a Fed rate hike, a Bank of Japan hike to a 31-year high, and the Clarity Act's failure — and never traded meaningfully below $75,000. That's either resilience or a very crowded short squeeze. CoinGlass suggests the latter.
Odds and Ends
- ECB launched Pontes, a platform letting eligible institutions settle wholesale tokenized asset transactions in central bank money — an explicit alternative to stablecoins and tokenized commercial-bank deposits. Full implementation expected by 2028.
- Perp futures tied to the "bitcoin VIX" (BVIV) debuted on Hyperliquid, collateralized and denominated in USDC with up to 5x leverage, via Markets by Kinetiq, Volmex, and Perps.inc.
- X sued two UK residents over an alleged $277,000 Creator Revenue Sharing fraud, citing nine accounts posting near-identical crypto content — one instance 11 seconds apart.
- Google Cloud is hiring a Web3 architect in Hong Kong for RWA tokenization; Apple is seeking an Apple Pay financial product strategy lead. Neither confirms a crypto product, but both signal where the expertise is heading.
Big Tech hiring for stablecoin and tokenization rails is the quiet tell. They don't staff up for things they plan to ignore.
Closing Take
The AI x crypto narrative is consolidating around two real things: agent infrastructure (inference standards, security, payments) and the chains willing to torch their own L1s to chase it. NEAR's Intents volume and ZetaChain's surrender are two sides of the same coin — one is finding product-market fit, the other is admitting it didn't. The OCC opening bank doors to AI agents is the story that actually matters for the next cycle, because it's the first time the plumbing for agents to move real money through regulated rails is being laid in public. Everything else this week is price action and positioning.
Not financial advice. Side-Eye Signals reports; you decide.