NEAR Protocol

Here’s everything you need to know about NEAR: ✦ What NEAR is today, from NEAR Protocol to $NEAR token, Intents to IronClaw ✦ Why NEAR matters ✦ Why now 🧵

Everyone is hopping on the agentic commerce hype train but we've been building towards this future for years. So much so that Illia was invited to speak at @NVIDIAGTC yesterday about the market primitives of the agentic economy, where he painted the full picture of how @near_ai, @near_intents, and @NEARProtocol come together. In short, we are entering an era where AI agents don't just answer questions, they take actions, negotiate contracts, hire other agents, move money, manage your life, and become their own economic actors. The question is whether that future will be owned by a few companies that prioritize profits over people or if it will be truly user-owned. Today's markets were designed for humans which means they're full of irrational behavior, bias, expensive legal overhead, and rent-seeking middlemen. Agents have none of that so when agents transact, they optimize on outcomes. This changes everything. But for agents to act on your behalf at that scale, they need to be secure and private. IronClaw solves this as a secure + open-source agent runtime to protect users from prompt injection and data leakage. These agents will run inside a Confidential Virtual Machine (CVM), inference happens inside hardware-enforced private enclaves, and every execution comes with cryptographic attestations users can verify. Only you and your agent can see / manage your credentials, data, and digital life. This is an important part for what it means to have "user-owned AI". Once agents can be trusted to act, they need a way to coordinate and act on declarative specifications of a desired outcome under specific constraints. This is what we call an "Intent" and you can think of it as a contract that speaks plain english like "here is what I want, this is my budget, and this is how we resolve it if something goes wrong. Intents can be auctioned, split, and negotiated peer-to-peer between agents. They carry full context so if a dispute is triggered, the dispute agent has access to the entire contract, the worker's submission, and every intermediate piece of information from the start. Just an agent reading the record and issuing a ruling. For agents to actually pay for goods, they need liquidity to fill the user's request. That's why we shipped @near_intents over a year ago. Since then it has processed over $15B in volume across more than 35 chains. Over time, this abstracts all blockchains away from each other and more asset classes will be added to this global liquidity network. For services, the NEAR AI Marketplace will connect your personal agents to jobs so you can continue making money. Illia made this concrete with a side-by-side comparison where he put the same job on Fiverr vs. an agent on the NEAR Agent Marketplace. The Fiverr freelancer took two days to write a sub-par report and tried to charge an extra $150 for the "full report" on top of the $15 trial. Meanwhile, an agent completed a better report in an hour for $3. We expect agent costs to decrease while output quality goes up over time. The marketplace will also support every major interoperability standard including MCP, A2A, x402, ACP, etc. so everyone's personal agents can communicate and pay each other seamlessly. These implications go far beyond commerce. Illia closed with the idea that these same primitives, agents voting to allocate budget, measuring outcomes against milestones, and reallocating automatically when targets are missed, could be applied to public goods funding and government spending. The persistent challenge with public institutions is lack transparency, clear attribution, and ROI. Agents can fix the accountability problem at the infrastructure level. All of this runs on @NEARProtocol which serves as the distributed network that no single party controls. It decentralizes linearly with demand and can already process 1M transactions per second, faster than Visa and Mastercard combined. Every person will eventually have their own private, secure agent managing their life and buying $NEAR is the best hedge for this disruptive AI future.

Venice is verifiably private with NEAR AI @AskVenice integrated with @near_ai confidential inference providing cryptographic proof of privacy. Join @ilblackdragon and @ErikVoorhees live on X at 10AM PT as they explore the integration and dive deep into privacy in the industry.

@InstaSwap_io @near_intents Instantly thing got more Intents. Welcome to NEAR

🤝 InstaSwap has partnered with @near_intents! This collaboration enables cross-chain swaps with access to Near Intents as part of a broader execution layer. InstaSwap continues to focus on seamless, non-custodial, walletless swap execution.

Excited to partner with @AskVenice to continue expanding privacy for AI. Privacy is fundamental right and it’s even more important in AI age. Join me and @ErikVoorhees tomorrow 10am PT on X for a deep dive.

All-time volume on @near_intents has crossed $15 Billion Just Intent it on near.com

Ready in 193ms. IronClaw.

Most AI systems are built on one assumption: you trust the provider. @AskVenice and NEAR AI are removing that assumption. Venice users can now run prompts inside a secure enclave, sealed from the cloud provider, the OS, and the infrastructure layer. Privacy you can verify. near.ai/blog/venice-is…

NEAR Intents: Enabling universal trading across tokenized assets and onchain markets. + NEAR AI: Powering a private, verifiable, user-owned AI ecosystem. = NEAR: The commerce layer connecting assets, agents, and value.

You can't post a random color and expect people to recognize it.

NEAR AI's confidential inference now brings @AskVenice users verifiable privacy 👇

The NEAR Legion is building on the ground. 10 cities. 10 validator nodes. Each funded by staking rewards to run events, host builders, and grow a local NEAR community. Apply today: near.org/blog/legion-ci…

NEAR Co-Founder @ilblackdragon takes the stage at @NVIDIAGTC today @ 9AM PT It's the year of the Claws and AI agents are emerging as significant economic actors. Join as Illia introduces a new set of agentic market primitives by showcasing the NEAR AI Agent Market and IronClaw.

This new report from @nansen_ai highlights NEAR's biggest developments across the entire stack: -Protocol: 1M TPS scalability -Intents: the fastest-growing cross-chain protocol -NEAR AI: confidential inference infrastructure -Upgraded tokenomics: Halving + fee switch -Institutional validation: SVRN, Bitwise, and more -Outlook on NEAR as the unified commerce layer Full report: research.nansen.ai/articles/nanse…

The agentic economy has arrived but agents who expose your competitive advantage are useless. The winners will be the systems that agents and their human overlords can trust. NEAR Intents and NEAR AI are building for that future.

@ilblackdragon Intents + AI + Confidentiality = The Unified Commerce Layer for Assets and Agents (aka NEAR)

Agents can now swap securely across all NEAR Intents supported chains at 0.0001% fees. Unlock NEAR Intents API for your agents and a tap into the new internet economy 👇

Check out this article from RHEA to learn how to get started 👇

ATTENTION: NEAR20, an Agentic Yield-Bearing Token has just launched via @margfinance "The launch of NEAR20 represents a significant milestone in bringing institutional-quality yield products to the NEAR ecosystem" - Philipp Suarez, Head of Finance at NEAR Foundation

@PopeSmokeX @near_intents @near_ai How about a whole playlist? youtube.com/playlist?list=…

@NEARProtocol @near_intents @near_ai could you create a video tutorial on how to run agents on NEAR?

The future of markets isn’t just human...It’s agentic. Agents discovering assets. Negotiating prices. Executing trades autonomously. All powered by @near_intents + @near_ai Welcome to the unified agent economy.