NDNA 4 - How NEAR Intents Kills the Hacker’s Favorite Target

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

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   It's August 13th, 2025, and this is NDNA. The idea of moving value across blockchains once felt like you were going through the jungle or unexplored wilderness. Every time you were bridging something from point A to point B, it was that crossing of a rickety bridge or walking over that log that's fallen down. It was basically blind faith in some custodian and a contract that had already been hopefully audited. For a time that distance between chains felt

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   almost romantic, though it was like a mark of maxianism, going to like a far-flung citystate in an earlier age. But this was not a path to mainstream adoption. Yet sometimes you would still have to spend your afternoon in a panic trying to find some support and likely not being able to have any help when funds didn't arrive on time across these bridges. The treacherous crossing was

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   better known as wrapped asset bridges and it follows a couple simple steps how it works. The user could just lock their tokens on the original chain. A multi-IG contract or some kind of oracle would now approve of that wrapping and then an IOU would appear on the destination chain and contracts have to live in both places. The entire SDK for these bridges is built with mint and burn logic guardian keys and a process that was really nebulous at best. But one could argue from a distance that this design

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   might have even seemed elegant. But when you get closer to it, you realize that a handful of private keys were guarding billions in value. Essentially, this is all one bad line of code away from ending catastrophe. We actually saw this happen on a large scale multiple times with bridges starting back in February 2022 when an attacker forged a single Guardian signature and siphoned almost 320 million from Worm's Bridge. A month later, the Ronin bridge that was

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   supporting Axi Infinity lost 625 million after validators were coerced into signing and fraudulent withdrawals. While these were linked to different groups such as like North Korea's Lazarus at the time, each incident would send shock waves and create distrust and a lot of people lost a lot of real money.

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   But beyond the theft, the other troubling part with these bridges is that even when the bridge behaved well and worked the way they were supposed to, the experience felt much closer to like filing your taxes than managing money. This is also when even if it was not an exploit, the idea of the different arbitrageages, uh, me and different economic attacks would come into play. This really made

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   the experience poor for the user. Even if their money wasn't stolen, they were likely to lose money from high fees and other issues across these bridges. That brings us back to now late in 2024 where near there was a new perspective on this bridging paradigm.

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   Maybe how bridges work is actually backwards. Instead of scripting how value should crossch change, maybe we should let users, their apps, and even AI agents declare what outcomes they want and let a solver complete this. The idea here is that if you have an open market of solvers, let them handle the messy logistics. This is a way of basically disrupting even their own product, which is one of the safest and best bridges in all of crypto, the rainbow bridge through Aurora.

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   This is such a significant opportunity which then became called near intense that is now a flagship part of the chain abstraction part of the road map on near and the reason why this is a flagship piece of tech is that it's so simple on the surface an intent is really just a signed JSON payload and that really could be anything not just financial but that's separate something as simple as I'll give you a th000 USDC on near if someone delivers a,000 USDC on Salana.

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    You are then presented with the best options from the solvers and if you confirm once that's been broadcast again based on these solvers who are saying they're willing to solve this for that request, you can have you have the swap along with the cryptographic proof of that successful execution. The user doesn't have to leave their wall. They don't have to sign into multiple walls.

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    They don't even need a custodial vault or any other additional piece of tech. From a news perspective, the other week suite came in on board as part of the intense ability to swap to USDC and some other tokens along with their native token. Now we have the announcement of Cardano also coming on to Intense as well. And that may be confusing because now you have all these different protocols. You might say, oh, you'd have to bridge now because the protocols are so different. But that's really not the

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    case. And more importantly, when someone like Cardano comes on to intense, it's not just about Cardano to near it's also about Cardano now to Sweet, Cardano to ETH, Cardano to Salana. It now again becomes multi-directional in every way.

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    And every time a new chain comes on board, it becomes exponentially uh more attractive to users because you can go across all these different things. That is a differentiator. For builders though, the implications are more straightforward. Instead of integrating five different bridges and praying they don't implode along with trying to manage different SDKs and keeping up to date with all of that, you now simply have to just wire in your

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    intense SDK and focus on what your products are supposed to be doing. Then let the solver network do the rest. This is really just another win. Not because it's less building for the developer, because it's less building messy infrastructure for them. the users now have a bigger payoff because you're not restrapping tokens. There's no more browser extensions. There's less opportunity for things to get stuck or whatever else. Your focus can be on the

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    user experience as a developer thanks to simplification use of near intense. I'll end with that it should get noted that bridges served as the covered wagons for crypto's frontier era. Arguably a necessary step as a larger landscape has grown including everything that has gone wrong with the initial bridge era. It is clear Near Intense is in the next phase and this is the next phase of asset swap

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    and crosschain capabilities. This has been NDNA. Please like, subscribe, and share with your friends. We'll see you back here next week.