NEAR Protocol has unveiled a sweeping expansion of its infrastructure, launching an integrated blockchain and AI stack designed to power autonomous markets and cross-chain commerce. Announced at NEARCON in San Francisco, the updates signal a major evolution for the protocol shifting it from a high-throughput Layer 1 blockchain into what it describes as a unified commerce layer for onchain markets and AI agents.
At the center of this transformation is near.com, a consumer-facing multichain super-app powered by NEAR Intents. The platform connects more than 35 blockchains through a single account, allowing users to execute cross-chain swaps, peer-to-peer settlements, and optional confidential transactions without manually bridging assets or navigating fragmented networks. By abstracting away blockchain complexity while preserving wallet control, NEAR is positioning itself as an execution layer that removes friction without sacrificing sovereignty.
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A key addition to the stack is Confidential Intents, built directly into NEAR Intents. This feature introduces restricted-visibility environments for cross-chain transactions, enabling users and institutions to opt into confidentiality across transfers, deposits, and withdrawals while maintaining verifiable onchain execution. For institutional participants concerned about frontrunning or strategy replication in DeFi environments, this addresses one of the sector’s long-standing structural limitations.
On the AI front, NEAR introduced IronClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime that deploys agents within encrypted enclaves on NEAR AI Cloud. The system allows developers and enterprises to run always-on AI agents secured by hardware-level confidentiality, protecting credentials and sensitive workflows from infrastructure intermediaries. As AI agents increasingly handle financial transactions and operational processes, the demand for secure execution environments continues to grow — and NEAR is clearly aiming to meet that need head-on.
Complementing this is the launch of NEAR’s Confidential GPU Marketplace, a trusted execution environment (TEE)-secured compute network designed for enterprise and government AI workloads. Jobs run inside encrypted enclaves, with hardware-signed attestation delivered in under 30 seconds. GPU operators cannot access memory during processing, making it possible to run sensitive inference workloads without exposing data to cloud providers. The marketplace also opens a monetization channel for data centers with idle GPU capacity, creating a two-sided infrastructure economy.
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Underpinning the entire ecosystem upgrade is Nightshade 3.0, the latest evolution of the NEAR architecture. The upgrade separates consensus from execution, introduces atomic transactions, and enables a live private shard. This design allows the protocol to scale beyond one million transactions per second while embedding new privacy primitives directly at the protocol layer — reinforcing NEAR’s emphasis on performance, confidentiality, and composability.
NEAR is also advancing its economic framework with the activation of the NEAR Intents fee switch, introducing built-in revenue sharing with integration partners. As usage expands across third-party distribution channels, protocol revenue scales in parallel. Through governance and subject to compliance requirements, product revenues may support token buybacks, buyback-and-earn mechanisms, and broader treasury actions. NEAR Intents has already directed more than $1 million worth of $NEAR toward buybacks, signaling a shift toward a more structured value-capture model.
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Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin emphasized that autonomous AI agents require universal execution, hardware-enforced security, and scalable settlement layers to operate in real markets. With this release, NEAR is converging blockchain and AI infrastructure into a single architecture where agents can transact, negotiate, and execute securely at global scale.
Taken together, the announcements reposition NEAR from a performance-focused blockchain into integrated infrastructure for autonomous digital commerce. Cross-chain execution, confidential compute, AI agent runtime environments, and token-aligned economics now operate within one cohesive framework — built to reduce complexity while preserving transparency, verifiability, and user ownership.
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