Has NEAR Become the Ultimate AI Network?

NEAR Protocol is one of the strongest contenders for the AI-blockchain crown, but "ultimate" is still a stretch. What's not a stretch is the infrastructure it has built over the past 18 months: privacy-preserving compute, chain abstraction for autonomous agents, and institutional momentum that's hard to ignore.

The honest answer depends on what you mean by AI network. If you mean verifiable, private, multichain agent execution, NEAR is ahead of most other chains. If you mean the full spectrum of decentralized machine intelligence, the field is still wide open.

What Has NEAR Actually Built?

The foundation here isn't just marketing. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin co-authored "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 paper that underpins the transformer architecture behind modern large language models. He didn't come to AI from blockchain. He came to blockchain from AI, and that shapes everything NEAR has built since.

A series of launches in late 2025 and early 2026 made the pivot concrete.

Privacy-First AI Infrastructure

NEAR launched NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat in late 2025, enabling end-to-end encrypted model deployments using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), specifically Intel TDX and NVIDIA confidential computing. TEEs allow computation to run on hardware that's verifiably isolated, meaning neither the node operator nor external observers can access the data being processed.

Data privacy has been one of the biggest friction points blocking enterprise AI adoption. NEAR is directly targeting that gap.

The Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning (DCML) framework extends this further, offering verifiable AI training and fine-tuning while keeping source data private. Open-source developers can also monetize their models through the same framework.

Current integrations include Brave Nightly, OpenMind (robotics and privacy), and TravAI, reaching over 100 million users combined.

AI Agents as the Primary Users

Polosukhin has been direct about NEAR's thesis: AI agents will be the primary users of blockchain, with AI as the frontend and blockchain as the invisible backend. Everything in NEAR's roadmap reflects that, with the 2026 priorities covering AI-Intents convergence, user-owned AI, larger MPC networks, and sharding across both chain and network.

The core piece is NEAR Intents, a chain abstraction layer that handles cross-chain execution, intent-based routing, and unified liquidity. Agents can own wallets, make decisions, and transact across multiple chains without managing each chain's mechanics directly. Intents have processed billions in volume.

In March 2026, NEAR introduced Confidential Intents, adding optional privacy to cross-chain execution via private shards and TEEs. The practical effect is shielding agent transactions from front-running bots, a real problem in any high-frequency execution environment.

Additional tooling includes:

• Shade Agent Framework - for building verifiable, trustless agents
• IronClaw - a secure runtime environment for agent execution
• Bitte Protocol - no-code multichain agent deployment
• Eliza - open-source agent development framework

The near.com super app, launched in February 2026, brings these pieces together for end users: feeless cross-chain swaps, AI assistance, and agent automation in a single interface.

Performance and Scale

None of this matters without throughput. In December 2025, NEAR hit 1 million TPS in a publicly verifiable benchmark using Nightshade 2.0 sharding, with sub-$0.01 fees and 1.2-second finality. The February 2026 Nightshade 3.0 upgrade then added privacy sharding, which runs private shards inside TEEs, allowing public and private state to coexist. For agents handling sensitive transactions, that combination of speed and privacy in a single architecture is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

What's the Institutional Picture?

OceanPal (Nasdaq: SVRN) launched SovereignAI as a wholly owned subsidiary in October 2025, following a $120 million raise, with the subsidiary focused on building a NEAR-based digital asset treasury and AI cloud infrastructure. Grayscale runs a dedicated Grayscale Near Trust (GSNR) on OTC Markets, one of the first single-asset investment vehicles that give institutional exposure directly to NEAR, with reports as of January 2026 indicating that Grayscale is exploring an ETF conversion.

These aren't soft signals.

Is "Ultimate" the Right Word?

Not yet, and the case against it is straightforward.

NEAR's Intents layer is a powerful cross-chain infrastructure, but it's not uniquely AI-native. Other L1s are pursuing similar chain abstraction. Bittensor focuses on decentralized ML incentives and model coordination, a different layer of the AI stack where NEAR has less presence. The AI-blockchain space has no clear winner, and several well-funded projects are competing across different angles.

NEAR's real edge is the convergence of privacy-preserving compute and intent-based agent execution. That's a specific, defensible position. Whether it becomes dominant comes down to one question: do AI agents actually flock to NEAR as their default execution layer?

The infrastructure exists. The adoption metrics are moving. But the agentic economy Polosukhin describes is still in its early stages, and timing matters as much as technology. NEAR has built the right infrastructure for a particular version of that future. Whether that version wins is still being decided.

For more information, visit near.org or follow @NEARProtocol on X.

Sources:

• NEAR Protocol Blog - official updates on NEAR AI Cloud, Confidential Intents, Nightshade 2.0 and 3.0, and the near.com super app launch
• NEAR Intents Documentation - technical overview of chain abstraction, cross-chain execution, and intent routing
• Grayscale Near Trust - dedicated single-asset NEAR investment vehicle on OTC Markets (ticker: GSNR)
• OceanPal / SovereignAI - The Block coverage of the $120M raise and SovereignAI subsidiary launch
• Attention Is All You Need (Arxiv) - original transformer paper co-authored by Illia Polosukhin
• Bittensor - competing decentralized ML network for context on the broader AI-blockchain landscape