NEAR Protocol: Bringing AI and Smart UX Onchain

It’s September 2025 and user experience is still one of the biggest barriers to wider adoption in crypto. The industry often talks about the need for public blockchains and the applications built on them to reach the mainstream. But for most people, using self-custody wallets is still confusing and their experience on most dApps is daunting. 

Recognising this issue years ago, NEAR Protocol has focused on building technology that makes crypto easier to use. Since last year, it has also ramped up developer efforts in artificial intelligence (AI). It is bringing AI solutions onchain while also building tools and the technology to simplify how people interact onchain. 

In this edition of the Crypto Market Monitor, we look at how NEAR is working to connect AI and crypto while addressing one of the sector’s most persistent challenges: user experience. 

What is NEAR Protocol 

NEAR is a layer-1 (L1) blockchain that uses sharding and proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, with an increasing focus on chain abstraction and AI integration. The project was founded in 2017 by Alexander Skidanov (a computer scientist and former OpenAI research engineering consultant) and Ilya Polosukhin (an AI researcher and former engineering manager at Google Research). NEAR protocol is backed by Dragonfly Capital Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, and Pantera Capital. The network’s native token is NEAR and is used primarily to pay transaction fees. 

NEAR offers dynamic resharding. This is where the network can add or reduce the number of shards depending on the level of onchain activity. (Think of shards as parallel sub-chains within the main network where each of them processes its own set of transactions.) This gives the ability to allocate computational resources as per network demand and also brings parallel processing capabilities to help keep it fast.  

Unlike most high fully diluted value (FDV) projects today that have a supply overhand due to insider allocation, the NEAR token’s genesis supply is almost fully unlocked with less than 0.5% (allocated towards community and operational grants) remaining.  

NEAR Protocol shows resilience in its onchain metrics with user activity standing out as one of its strongest signals of adoption. At the time of writing, NEAR records 2.9 million daily active addresses, the second-highest across major L1 networks, just behind Solana. This level of consistent engagement shows that NEAR’s applications and chain-abstraction features are resonating with users at scale, reinforcing its usability-first approach. 

Figure: NEAR ranks second after Solana in total daily active addresses 

Source: Artemis (18 September 2025) 

NEAR currently holds around $99 million in total value locked (TVL). The total stablecoin market cap on the network is $195.61 million, with USDC accounting for 45% of that share. Within DeFi, Rhea Finance has a cumulative volume of over $16 billion, making it the largest trading and lending market on NEAR. Veax DEX ranks next with a cumulative trading volume of $51.29 million. Rhea Finance dominates both in activity as well as revenue, having generated over $1 million in revenue the past twelve months. 

Figure: DeFi TVL on NEAR stands just shy of $100 million 

Source: DeFi Llama (18 September 2025) 

NEAR’s DEX volumes provide further evidence of growing adoption, with daily trading volume on its DEXs reaching $49.7 million and volumes increasing by 86.7% over the past six months.  

Figure: Trading volumes on NEAR have seen an 86.7% jump over the past six months 

Source: Artemis (18 September 2025) 

The direction is clear and the numbers point to NEAR steadily gaining ground with user activity holding strong and capital flows picking up. The network looks to be building real depth and resilience onchain. 

NEAR Protocol has increasingly positioned itself as a network built for AI. This pivot began in 2022 and accelerated in 2023. For this vision, NEAR has developed a stack of AI-focused solutions. Let’s dive in. 

Firstly, AI models require heavy computation and sometimes, access to sensitive data. To facilitate this, NEAR’s stack now supports confidential and verifiable computing. NEAR has integrated Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). TEEs allow AI model execution with privacy where the model’s parameters and data remain encrypted. NEAR’s Shade Protocol leverages TEEs to create Shade Agents which are autonomous smart contracts coupled with off-chain AI agents. This is critical for DeFi-based AI agents where users must trust an AI with funds. 

Next, NEAR is also developing agent interaction/transaction protocol (AITP) as an open standard for agent-to-agent interactions on the chain. The goal with this is to build an automated marketplace for AI agents on NEAR. For example, two agents could form an agreement enforced by smart contracts. 

NEAR introduced an intents-based architecture (called NEAR Intents) that lets users or AI agents specify desired outcomes and the system routes and executes transactions across multiple chains in the background. This removes the need for direct wallet and bridge interactions which gives a multifold improvement to user experience onchain. Using Intents, the user can broadcast their intent in words (for example, “swap 100k USDC to BTC”) to the solvers on the network. The system then takes care of the rest from collecting quotes to the settlement of the transaction.  

Last year, NEAR also launched Chain Signatures which allows one NEAR account to sign transactions on other chains in a trust-minimised way without relying on any centralised  custodian or middleware provider like a bridge operator. This makes it possible to build AI agents on NEAR with a single identity to execute transactions cross-chain.  

NEAR Protocol also aims to build a blockchain operating system (BOS), which is their idea of changing how people experience blockchains. The vision is to make BOS act like a front end and middleware for the open-source internet that users can access irrespective of what chain they are on. A user should be able to interact with applications across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Cosmos or NEAR without worrying about switching networks or wallets. The goal is to make NEAR accounts the single identity, while the system in the background handles all transaction routing. 

NEAR’s BOS is designed to address poor user experience which has been one of the biggest hurdles in crypto adoption. By abstracting away onchain experience to make it feel like a single application with unified liquidity, NEAR aims to make onboarding equally simple for people who are not crypto natives. 

NEAR is steadily building out its network with a focus on making blockchain simpler and more useful. It has strong partnerships as well. For example, interoperability protocol Everclear adopted NEAR to provide cross-chain stablecoin liquidity, asset manager Bitwise launched a NEAR Staking exchange traded product to give institutional investors access to staking yields in addition to exposure to NEAR, Deutsche Telekom became the first telecom company to run a NEAR validator, and the integration of NEAR Intents across most major chains including recent ones like Sui and Aptos signal market commitment. 

Features like Chain Signatures, NEAR Intents and user-owned AI show the NEAR team’s push to handle more activity while simplifying the onchain experience for users. These efforts makes NEAR an L1 designed not only for today’s dApps but also for a future where AI agents, cross-chain liquidity and simplified onboarding define blockchain adoption. 

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