See this thesis by @mert on $NEAR. ZEC is the privacy equivalent to $BTC - a private SoV. But ZEC can’t do more than that. And it shouldn’t. It does very well what it’s supposed to do. $NEAR brings privacy to smart contracts, perps, payments/trades, agents, AI inference, stocks, and the whole flow of money. Sort of how $ETH was meant to be complementary to Bitcoin and the DeFi layer. But ETH turned out to be imperfect. Now it’s NEAR what is connecting all L1s and L2s, adapting to their language and architecture (PoW, EVMs, rust, move, etc) instead of forcing them to build on top. And now we have AI and agents. Not only did @NEARProtocol pioneer sharding at scale (where ETH failed), it also became the first-ever blockchain with dynamic resharding, which allows it to scale horizontally dynamically as per demand — a must for a mass-scale agentic economy. This is a big moat that no one has been able to even attempt. It also achieved 1M TPS and it’s already Quantum Resistant. So you have a massively scalable and high-performance L1, with native privacy, interconnecting any blockchain in the space, built for an agentic economy, powering both money flows and inference. ZEC is the privacy SoV. NEAR is the privacy programmable layer. The TAM (total addressable market) of NEAR is in discovery mode.