Not a conventional bridge — you sign a desired outcome and competing solvers fill it, settled atomically on NEAR. Monad is a small, early leg of a much larger network.
NEAR Intents isn't a lock-and-mint bridge — it's an intents system. A user signs an intent expressing a desired outcome ("swap this token on chain A for that token on chain B") rather than a specific execution path. An open, permissionless network of solvers — market makers, arbitrageurs, MEV searchers — competes off-chain to offer the best fill, drawing on liquidity sources a plain AMM can't reach, including centralized order books and OTC desks. The winning fill settles atomically through a Verifier contract on NEAR, which enforces strict net-zero settlement: either every leg of a multi-step swap executes, or none do, with NEAR-side finality around 1.2 seconds. Cross-chain asset control is largely handled through NEAR's "Chain Signatures," an MPC scheme where 8 independent NEAR validator nodes collectively sign transactions natively on other chains across multiple threshold rounds — letting NEAR-side contracts reach into foreign chains without a conventional token bridge for many assets.
The base protocol fee is small, roughly 1 basis point — cheaper on paper than many bridges' dynamic fee models — but solvers separately capture the bid/ask spread on each fill, typically 1-8bps on cross-chain stablecoin-type transfers, and can net opposing intents internally (a solver matching a NEAR→ETH intent against an ETH→NEAR intent without ever touching either chain) for extra efficiency. What that fee structure obscures is that solvers running real cross-chain inventory carry a genuine cost of capital — a solver holding tens of millions of dollars of standing inventory across chains has to earn enough spread to cover that funding cost, which is straightforward on liquid majors but can mean much thinner, less competitive quoting on smaller or newer pairs. Some integrators build automatic fallback routing to other cross-chain protocols specifically for cases where NEAR Intents solver interest turns out insufficient — itself evidence that solver-availability risk is real enough to need a backstop.
Against Unit — the other cross-chain option in this set — NEAR Intents sits on the more trust-minimized end: Unit's Guardian Network holds locked funds in a small MPC quorum between deposit and mint, while NEAR Intents has no pooled custody at all, since each intent is independently collateralized by whichever solver fills it, and the Verifier is stateless between orders. A February 2026 feature, Confidential Intents, routes execution through a TEE-secured private NEAR shard so other solvers or observers can't see trade parameters and front-run or copy a strategy — a capability Unit's Guardian model can't easily replicate, since its compliance screening and circuit-breaker logic depend on visible, verifiable on-chain deposit and withdrawal events. The user-facing effect looks similar to a bridge either way — assets move chains — but the trust and failure-mode structure underneath is fundamentally different.
Monad became a supported chain on NEAR Intents the day after Monad's own mainnet launch, one of roughly two dozen chains the network connects, enabling swaps of 120+ assets across major chains directly into or out of MON with no separate bridging step. Monad's share of NEAR Intents' total tracked value is small — well under 1% of the network-wide total.
Every trade depends on a solver actually having, or being willing to deploy, inventory to fill it at the quoted price — on a young, low-liquidity chain integration like Monad, the pool of solvers actively quoting is almost certainly thinner than on NEAR's larger connected chains, meaning bigger Monad-side swaps could see worse pricing or simply not get filled competitively. An intent can fail three distinct ways: no solver bids at all, a solver bids but never delivers, or a solver delivers but the settlement proof fails — none of these strand funds in a bridge contract the way a classic bridge exploit would, but they can mean your swap simply doesn't happen or fills worse than quoted. Chain Signatures' security also rests on the honesty and liveness of an 8-node MPC signing set rather than pure smart-contract logic — a different attack surface than a typical bridge contract exploit. And because NEAR Intents has no pools of its own, Monad's usefulness within the network is entirely a function of ongoing solver participation there.
Because under the hood it still has to move value across chains — but instead of a smart-contract vault holding pooled reserves, each swap is filled by a solver who independently collateralizes that specific trade, and settlement is enforced atomically by NEAR's Verifier contract using 8-node MPC Chain Signatures rather than a bridge's lock-and-mint flow. The user-facing effect looks similar; the trust structure underneath is different.
The intent simply doesn't execute. Some third-party integrators build automatic fallback routing to other cross-chain protocols for exactly this scenario, but NEAR Intents itself doesn't guarantee a fill — and since Monad is a newer, smaller integration, solver competition on MON pairs is plausibly thinner than on BTC/ETH/SOL pairs.
There's a small roughly 1bps base protocol fee, plus solvers capture a spread (typically 1-8bps) as their profit for competing to fill your intent — the effective cost depends entirely on how many solvers are actively competing for your specific pair at that moment.
It's a February 2026 feature that routes intent execution through a TEE-secured private NEAR shard so other solvers or observers can't see your trade parameters and front-run or copy your strategy — opt-in, not default. It's a NEAR-wide capability rather than Monad-specific, but any Monad-related intent routed through it would inherit that protection.
Sources: NEAR Intents, Chain Signatures — NEAR Docs, Intent Bridges: Where Value Leaks and Assumptions Fail — Cantina, Confidential Intents — NEAR Blog, NEAR Intents Fees — Docs
Last reviewed 2026-07-08. More Monad research.
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