NEAR Protocol

Open standards are required for an open agent economy. We're bringing the full @near_ai stack to the @x402Foundation ecosystem so agents can reason with any model and transact across any chain – while preserving users’ privacy.

The account model NEAR designed years ago was built with the quantum threat in mind. Post-quantum signing is on testnet now, and NEAR is rolling out upgrades to secure the protocol, the Intents ecosystem and the agent economy. Dive into NEAR’s quantum readiness.

I can't share exciting news about cool features going live daily. It takes work to design and implement, it takes time to test, to rollout, for the validators to upgrade, etc. But the team is constantly building and today I wanted to highlight an important, but not a particularly flashy upgrade. Nearcore release 2.12 moved NEAR runtime from NearVM to Wasmtime. It took quite some effort to get it over the finish line with all the changes and testing, but this is not one of those things that gets you to the headlines. If you tell anyone on X that NEAR runtime is now Wasmtime, they will probably shrug and say "what does it change". Well, indeed it did not change anything for the developers and end users. The release went very smoothly, barely noticed by anyone. But that is exactly the point. We addressed a critical piece of technical debt and did not break anything. Today I'm happy to share a technical write-up from our team detailing all the challenges and reasons behind the 2.12 release. Spoiler: compilers are not developed to be used as is in the blockchain context. blog.nearone.org/research/2026/…

Read the full announcement: near.org/blog/milestone…

Reminder: NEAR@3.33 is live. If you’ve been swapping confidentially on near.com, you’re already qualified. The floor is a sustained $100+ confidential balance and one confidential swap, everything above that shapes your allocation.

Full technical breakdown of the Confidential Intents’ privacy architecture: near.org/blog/how-confi…

Individual encryption, not pooled obfuscation. Mixers pool funds from any source and hand users the risk of the shared pool. Confidential Intents screens assets at ingress and encrypts each user's data individually. Order size, timing, counterparties: not public onchain.

Not all onchain privacy is built the same. Confidential Intents makes two deliberate architecture choices that separate it from ZK systems and mixers ↓

@Prophetzone @near_intents 🤝

Your trades. Your fund flows. Your private business.🔒 Fund your Prediction Market trades confidentially with Prophet — your strategy stays yours. WC26 semis: top 4 FIFA-ranked nations, all in. Setups like this don't come often. Powered by @near_intents × @NEARProtocol Built on @Polymarket app.prophet.zone/fifa

Full announcement: near.org/blog/near-foun…

The @NEARFoundation has joined the @x402Foundation to advance open infrastructure for the agent economy. The NF is working alongside global leaders such as AWS, AMEX, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa to build the open stack for agents, from universal payments to private inference.

The same volume now creates more protocol revenue than it did before. That is the difference between activity and value capture.

The capture rate moved from 11.8% lifetime to 15.5% over 30 days and 29.5% over 7 days. That is a major acceleration in a single quarter.

NEAR is accelerating toward deflationary status. Not as a slogan. As a measurable function of protocol revenue versus issuance.

The agent economy is being built. The question is who will own it. On closed rails, value pools above you. On open rails, it returns to the users, builders, and network participants, whose capital, data, and intent the agents act on. To you. The thesis for an open standard:

Agents reshape money itself. The NEAR token is built for these emerging functions: -Network sustainability: usage supports security and ecosystem economics -Settlement coordination: supports value movement across supported chains and assets -Bonding standard: economic commitments can help secure trust -Metering unit: supports machine-scale pricing for compute and inference NEAR is building AI money.

The race to shape the agent economy is on. Payment giants are retooling their rails for agents. Enterprises are pushing sovereign AI doctrines to keep control of their data and weights. Users want to own the alpha they create. Infrastructure will decide everything 🧵