NEAR in Plain English
San Francisco • Oct 7, 2026
NEAR is building at the intersection of two problems.
Crypto has a usability problem. There are hundreds of blockchains now, each with its own assets, applications, and rules, and moving money between them can be costly, cumbersome, and risky.
AI has a different problem. A handful of companies control the world's most powerful models, along with the data users hand them. As AI systems begin acting on our behalf—managing money, booking travel, negotiating purchases—they will need infrastructure that lets them transact without broadcasting sensitive data to those same companies.
NEAR was co-founded in 2018 by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, one of the co-authors of the landmark paper that introduced the architecture behind modern AI. The goal was a blockchain fast and cheap enough to serve millions of people and the billions of AI agents that may soon be transacting on their behalf.
Where NEAR stands today:
NEAR Intents, its cross-chain execution layer, has processed more than $30 billion in cumulative volume across 35+ blockchains.
Confidential Intents, launched in February 2026, was built for traders and institutions that need to transact privately. It already holds 50.6% of the total value in Intents.
NEAR recently added perpetual futures on Hyperliquid and partnered with Ondo Finance to bring tokenized stocks and ETFs into crypto wallets.
NEAR AI Cloud gives companies private access to leading AI models, running open-weight models like DeepSeek entirely inside trusted execution environments so that no one—including NEAR—can see the data.
A fee switch activated in February routes NEAR's share of Intents fees into open-market buybacks, and inflation was cut in half last year, from 5% to 2.5% per year.
NEAR is a two-part story: a rapidly growing onchain execution layer, with the infrastructure for the emerging agentic economy built on top of it. In this white paper, “NEAR in Plain English,” we explain how the pieces fit together, why the NEAR token is designed to capture the value they create, and what it means for investors.
READ WHITE PAPERBitwise Asset Management is a global crypto asset manager with $9 billion in client assets and a suite of over 70 investment products spanning ETFs, separately managed accounts, private funds, DeFi strategies, and staking. The firm has a nine-year track record and today serves more than 5,500 private wealth teams, RIAs, family offices and institutional investors as well as 21 banks and broker-dealers. The Bitwise team of technology and investment professionals is backed by leading institutional investors and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and London.
