asked the
$NEAR community what they wanted more clarity on
lot of people said the same thing
“wtf actually is near ai? what makes it different from every other chain yelling ai?
so heres my breakdown... not from a whitepaper, but from 4+ yrs deep in the
@NEARProtocol ecosystem, seeing it built from the inside out
1) agents, but real
most ai agents are just bots hitting apis
NEAR agents can actually hold wallets, sign txns, bridge funds, swap across chains - all without a single point of failure
thats because of shade, NEAR's non custodial multichain wallet infra built for agents
2) intents = chain abstraction in practice
instead of “connect wallet, choose chain, approve” 10 times… you just say what you want done
swap x to y, move funds, run an offchain task, etc
solvers compete to fulfill it in the best way possible, on any chain, at the best rate
3) user owned ai
your agent doesnt phone home to a centralized model that trains on your data
compute and storage can stay private, owned by you
this is where NEAR's confidential compute and dcml direction comes in
4) the dev side
full sdk, cli and quickstarts (rag agent, marketplace bots, custom tools)
registry to publish and discover agents
hub api to run them anywhere
why this matters?
its the first serious attempt to make agents both useful and trustless... and to make them a first class citizen onchain rather than an afterthought
the “blockchain for ai” meme only works if the chain can actually execute ai outputs onchain in a verifiable way
NEAR is one of the few actually pulling that off
this is not financial advice
just years of watching the pieces come together and knowing most people arent seeing the full picture yet
lock tf in fam 🧪