About · the thesis in full
Useful first. Valuable later.
The calculator and the corridor table are on the home page. This page asks what the result means for the NEAR token, what could make it wrong, and exactly how each number is made.
01Is it worth it for NEAR?
Useful for families long before it is meaningful for the token.
At 10%, $28.5B a year would cross NEAR Intents. Solvers and integrators would earn about $47M in fees (today: $54M); the part that reaches the NEAR protocol is about $8M, or 7.4% of the NEAR minted each year. The kill line was 5% at 10% adoption.
NEAR Intents moved $33.0B in the last year and charged $54M in fees, of which $9M reached the protocol: a take of 0.029% of volume.
NEAR mints 2.5% of its 1.31 billion supply a year, about $109M at $3.32. Today's Intents revenue covers 8.6% of it.
The winning corridors carry $285B a year, 9 times what Intents moved last year. So remittances could multiply Intents' usage many times over. Turning that into value for NEAR holders depends on the take rate, not the volume.
02What could make this wrong
The bear case, in full.
Cash in and out is the weak link.
The route depends on peer-to-peer markets: strangers, bank transfers that can be frozen, fraud. We price the top five public ads only; at scale, fills get worse. The stress-test slider shows how fast the wins shrink.
Some wins are regulatory arbitrage.
In India, Pakistan and Egypt dollars sell well above the official rate on peer-to-peer markets. We never count that premium as a gain, but its existence shows controls that regulators can tighten.
The law closes doors.
Crypto is illegal at one end of 46 corridors, and banks are barred from it in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Nigeria and others. Those corridors carry $73.0B a year that NEAR cannot serve today.
Incumbents keep getting cheaper.
The world average is 6.36%, but many Gulf → South Asia corridors already cost under 3% at the median provider, and some providers charge less than nothing. A cheaper rail only wins where today's price is high.
The volumes are modelled.
Corridor sizes come from the Center for Global Development's 2024 bilateral matrix, which allocates each country's total by migrant stocks. The authors call it indicative, not observed.
Little of it reaches the token.
Fees mostly pay solvers and integrators. Even large adoption adds single-digit percentages of NEAR's yearly new supply.
03Method and re-run
Every number comes from a public source and one command.
git clone https://github.com/farazeool/corridor-index cd corridor-index && npm install npm run fetch # pulls every source below into data/raw npm run thesis # rebuilds data/thesis.json and prints the verdict
What families pay today+
World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, rpw_dataset_2011_2025_q3.xlsx (sheet "Dataset (from Q2 2016)"), column "cc1 total cost %" (sending the equivalent of US$200). Period 2025_3Q.
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037898/Remittance-Prices-WorldwideHow much each corridor carries+
Center for Global Development, updated 2024 bilateral remittances matrix (Huckstep & Clemens, 2026), "Bilateral remittances (current US$)", year 2024. Modelled estimates, not observed transactions (the authors' caveat).
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/geography-remittances-updated-global-bilateral-remittances-matrixWhat NEAR Intents charges+
NEAR Intents 1Click API, POST https://1click.chaindefuser.com/v0/quote with dry: true (no funds move). Fetched 14 Nov 2026, 13:38 UTC; the page also asks for a live quote.
https://docs.near-intents.orgCash in and cash out+
Binance P2P public ad search (median of the top 5 USDT ads per side), against mid-market rates from ExchangeRate-API open endpoint, https://open.er-api.com/v6/latest/USD. Fetched 14 Nov 2026, 13:39 UTC.
https://p2p.binance.comIntents volume, fees and revenue+
DefiLlama: https://api.llama.fi/summary/fees/near-intents and /summary/dexs/near-intents. Fetched 14 Nov 2026, 13:39 UTC.
https://defillama.com/protocol/near-intentsNEAR supply and inflation+
https://rpc.mainnet.fastnear.com block (final) + EXPERIMENTAL_protocol_config; price from https://coins.llama.fi/prices/current/coingecko:near.
https://docs.near.org/api/rpc/protocolWhere crypto is illegal+
Wikipedia, Legality of cryptocurrency by country or territory, last edited 2026-08-21.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cryptocurrency_by_country_or_territoryThe rules. For each corridor, today's cost is the lower of the median provider and the average online provider, so NEAR is compared with the cheaper option. NEAR's cost is the premium paid to buy USDT with the sender's currency, plus the median Intents quote across 11 stablecoin routes, plus any discount when selling USDT for the receiver's currency. A premium on the selling side is ignored rather than counted as a gain. NEAR wins only if its cost plus a 1-point allowance is still below today's; it loses if its cost before the allowance is already above. Everything in between is too close to call.
04About the project
Built at NEAR HACKATHON for the Investment Thesis track.
Corridor Index started from a simple question asked in Kuwait, where most workers send part of their pay home every month: would NEAR actually make that cheaper? Instead of arguing from NEAR's own chain data, it tests NEAR against the prices families pay today.
Everything is open: the code, the raw data, the rules and the kill criteria. A GitHub Action re-runs the whole thesis every day.
Code: github.com/farazeool/corridor-index
Data: thesis.json · corridors.csv
Our other entry: Passpot, a rotating savings circle on NEAR (Social Money).
AI assistance: code, data pipeline and copy were written with an AI coding assistant, directed and checked by the authors.
Not investment advice. Numbers come from public sources and can be wrong; check them yourself with one command.