AI Summary
5 min readIn the middle of a conversation about stablecoins, Kendall Cole, co-founder of Proximity Labs, drops a quiet bombshell: the real action isn't about which stablecoin brand wins. It's about the fact that every major institution will issue its own, and users won't even know the ticker. "They're not gonna care that the user knows the full name and the ticker of that particular stable coin," he says. "It's just gonna be used as a piece of a database entry." This is the world NEAR Intents is built for — not a blockchain you choose, but a layer that makes blockchains invisible.
The Fragmentation Problem and Chain Abstraction
Proximity Labs is a core contributor to the NEAR ecosystem, and its guiding thesis is "chain abstraction." The insight came from running NEAR itself: the network became stronger the more it connected to other chains, but the user experience of moving between them was terrible. NEAR Intents was built to solve that. It started as a B2B infrastructure play, integrating with wallets like Trust Wallet and Ledger, and aggregators like LiFi. The goal was simple: make it so users forget which chain they are on. Increasingly, the goal is to make them forget they are on chains at all.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:04) **Introducing Kendall Cole & Proximity Labs** - Kendall Cole is co-founder of Proximity Labs, an R&D firm focused on the NEAR ecosystem.
- 2 (00:42) **The Future of Stablecoins: Brands vs. Backend Tools** - Kendall predicts many issuers but few new branded stablecoins; most will be used as invisible backend ledger entries.
- 3 (04:02) **Why Fragmentation is the Core Problem (Chain Abstraction Thesis)** - NEAR Intents was built from the belief that chains are less important than the assets and user experience across them.
- 4 (06:04) **Two Customer Types: B2B Infrastructure & Retail Front-End** - NEAR Intents started as pure B2B infrastructure for wallets (Trust Wallet, Ledger) and aggregators (LiFi), but now also powers the retail-facing NEAR.com.
- 5 (07:17) **David’s Personal "Near Piling On" Experience** - David describes how NEAR kept appearing in his workflow: through Infinex (UX upgrade), Venice (AI integration), and finally using NEAR.com to consolidate dust from 30 wallets.
- 6 (09:14) **The Three-Phase Build: Chains, Liquidity, Assets** - The roadmap evolved from integrating chains, to recruiting solvers/market makers for liquidity, to now supporting every type of asset (RWAs, tokenized stocks, prediction markets).
- 7 (13:06) **The RWA Explosion is a Bigger Opportunity than Meme Coins** - Tokenized stocks (e.g., Robinhood Chain) and regulated real-world assets create a massive demand for cross-chain asset movement, which is NEAR Intents' sweet spot.
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Show Notes
NEAR wants users to stop thinking about blockchains altogether. Proximity Labs co-founder Kendall Cole joins David to explain how NEAR Intents connects 35 chains, powers products like Infinex, brings tokenized assets and confidential transactions into one seamless experience, and turns fragmented crypto markets into a single account where users see assets, not infrastructure.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
2:29 Chains Need Neutrality
4:20 Near’s Chain Abstraction Vision
6:03 Wallets to Retail Expansion
9:30 Bootstrapping Liquidity and Partners
11:23 RWA Asset Explosion
15:00 Tokenized Stocks on Near
15:57 One App Across Chains
19:01 Near as Chain Abstraction
21:35 Trading Bots and Payments
24:54 MiCA’s Market Shock
28:16 Noncustodial Compliance Strategy
29:17 Euro Onramps into Near
31:38 Regulation Meets On-Chain Freedom
38:09 Confidential Intents Launch
41:15 Privacy for Users and Firms
43:36 Private Zcash Routing
46:50 Privacy for AI Models
49:52 Near’s Fee Capture Model
52:19 Crypto as Exchange Infrastructure
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RESOURCES
Kendall Cole
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendall-cole-91b00534/
Proximity Labs