• NEAR is up 5% in the day, catalyzed by success in AI staking, NEAR Business launch and heightened cross-chain activity.

• Users have staked 46% of the token's total supply despite yield being cut by half as compared to Q3 2025.

• DFINITY founder Dominic Williams says an expert scrutiny has revealed Near Confidential Intents is just a centralized layer with no open source code.

Near Protocol (NEAR) is one of the top performers today among the top ten 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap, following several ecosystem developments.

However, DFINITY founder Dominic Williams says he has it on good authority that the protocol’s privacy layer is not as good as the network claims it to be.

NEAR surges 5% on ecosystem developments

At press time, NEAR had rallied 5% in the day to trade at $5.29.

The spike was driven by several accomplishments, including a milestone of over 1 million NEAR staked using the network’s decentralized AI framework, NEAR AI. The staking economy is built such that users and developers need to stake NEAR tokens to pay for private AI compute and secure agent slots.

As for general staking, Bitwise crypto investment firm noted in a recent report that users have currently staked 596 million NEAR tokens, which is equal to 46% of the total supply. The community maintained this staking ratio in the last three quarters despite the protocol’s near 50% reduction in staking yield to 4.87%.

Even more, Near recently launched Near Business, a confidential multi-sig treasury for crypto-utilizing businesses. It can be used to make payments, swaps, and capital allocations across more than 35 chains.

Near Intents transactional volume is now at $35.60 billion, representing a 14.6x year-over-year.

Doubts over Near’s confidential intents underlying tech

In a recent post, DFINITY founder Dominic Williams said a review by a PhD graduate has made him skeptical of Near’s Confidential Intents architecture.

He said the privacy feature ran on a separate instance of the protocol called FAR, was run by unknown centralized nodes and was not open source. He concluded by implying the network could be one of those overpromised Web3 projects.

Supporters agreed with his questioning, with some even noting they had similar doubts of the Near “snake oil”.

Most responses, however, came from critics who compared Internet Computer’s dull development and depressed ICP price, comparing it to the better-performing NEAR.

At press time, DFINITY’s ICP was trading at $2.90, more than 99% below its launch price.

Others simply shrugged off Williams’ comments, calling them a marketing strategy that relies on attacking the competition.

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