NEAR Intents Has Bought Back $6.68M of NEAR Using Fees

NEAR Intents routes swaps across chains, charges a fee for the work, and sends part of what it keeps into buying back its own token. That buyback has grown into a visible line item.

DefiLlama's page for NEAR Intents puts cumulative holders revenue, the money the project has put toward buying NEAR, at $6.68 million as of 19 October. September was the biggest month yet at $1.84 million, up from $723,262 in August and $504,864 in July. October had already reached $1.36 million by the 19th, with twelve days still to run.

It is a fraction of the $55.47 million in cumulative fees the same page records. The part worth watching is the direction: the monthly figure has more than tripled since July, and the wallet doing the buying can be checked on-chain.

Where the Money Comes From

NEAR Intents settles swaps between different chains, and the fee it charges rises with volume rather than with any single trade. Over the past 30 days, DefiLlama counts $7.37 million in fees, of which $2.31 million was protocol revenue, the share left after the people and apps that do the work are paid.

NEAR's own revenue dashboard sets out that split in plain terms: "Total Fees is the gross amount of fees collected across NEAR Protocol and NEAR Intents activity. Revenue is the portion captured by NEAR Protocol after payouts to integration partners, solvers, and dApps."

Fees are denominated in NEAR, and the address that receives the buyback share is named for the job: buybacks.multisignature.near. NearBlocks shows it was created seven months before 19 October, in transaction FW2BpwusTDxipLa94yr6BCsdczTcgM94iatKQBS6NPzz. The first month with recorded buybacks is February 2026, at $196,848, and the figure has been logged every month since.

Two Pages, Two Balances for the Same Wallet

The trail gets less tidy at the wallet itself. NearBlocks' account API reports 2,015,496.446 NEAR in buybacks.multisignature.near at block 220621578. NEAR's revenue dashboard lists the same address at 1,510,410.8 NEAR, 38.0% of an all-time wallet breakdown total. The two figures do not match, and nothing published alongside them explains the difference.

There is a second gap. Without the price paid on each purchase, the wallet's NEAR cannot be converted into a dollar total, so the buyback is best read in tokens and in the monthly revenue figures rather than as one lifetime sum.

The Fee Engine Underneath

The buyback is only as steady as the volume feeding it.

• Over the past 30 days: $7.37 million in fees, $2.31 million protocol revenue, and $4.496 billion in DEX volume.
• All time on DefiLlama: $55.47 million in fees and $34.443 billion in DEX volume.
• On NEAR's dashboard, updated 19 October: all-time Intents volume of $35.24 billion, 15.2 times the level a year earlier, and confidential TVL of $151.77 million, 1.9 times the month before.

The two dashboards do not use identical definitions, so their totals sit close together without matching exactly. What they agree on is scale: the fees are large enough that a single-digit percentage set aside for buybacks now runs into seven figures most months.

October's Exploit Landed in the Same Window

DefiLlama lists one security incident for NEAR Intents, on 1 October 2026, involving $3.8 million and classified as bridge and cross-chain. NEAR Intents said the funds were returned, with the refund arriving in Bitcoin and Monero in our earlier report on the refund.

That event sits inside the same October window as the $1.36 million of buybacks, so the month-end total will show whether the pace held through it.