NEW EP: Inside @NEARProtocol 10+ Years Building Toward the Agent Economy with Illia Polosukhin (@ilblackdragon) From pioneering the transformer architecture now used in every AI stack to building the rails for the agent economy, NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin connects the full arc in this inaugural episode of “Inside NEAR,” a new quarterly series on The Rollup. Illia breaks down NEAR’s early architectural bets that are now paying off, why privacy had to be a base-layer choice, and how it all culminates in NEAR becoming AI money: the unit of account for inference, compute, and every agent-to-agent transaction settling onchain. With $20 billion+ in Intents volume and a path to deflation, the thesis is simple: NEAR’s TAM isn't crypto, it's all of commerce. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:38 State Of NEAR Quarterly 04:32 The Transformer's Origin Story 06:51 NEAR Started As AI 11:40 Post-Quantum Crypto Coming Soon 13:48 Root Of Trust Solved 19:36 Target Market All Commerce 20:41 AI Frontend Blockchain Backend 22:44 Confidential Intents TVL Rising 28:51 Fee Switch Turned On 34:04 NEAR Is AI Money 36:30 One Line Changes Reality Full episode links below.

Looks like I missed almost the entire @NEARProtocol ecosystem run. Checking the latest onchain data, liquidity is clearly moving back into NEAR: – $NEAR DeFi TVL is around $205M – DEX volume hit ~$494M in 7D, up +41% WoW – @rhea_finance TVL is up +48.4% in 7D – @meta_pool is up +69.5% – @LinearProtocol is up +59.5% $NEAR is moving, and the major protocols inside the ecosystem are seeing solid liquidity growth as well. I think the way we look at NEAR needs an update. NEAR is building toward: a multi-chain super app + confidential by default – Intents: cross-chain liquidity w/ real usage, cumulative fees above ~$48M – Confidential layer: privacy for swaps, perps and AI interactions – Agent infra: agents can interact w/ capital while users can still verify execution – bringing the wider stack into one UX NEAR Intents also generated around $1.73M in fees over the last 7D, with cumulative fees now around $48.15M. For me, the edge is starting to show in the infra underneath: users moving assets across chains agents executing transactions privacy built directly into the stack I was pretty late to the latest $NEAR ecosystem wave. Still think this narrative is worth a look tho.

ICYMI: new @Bankless episode on the @NEARProtocol AI economy and staking for @near_ai, which lets you redirect staking yield towards private & verifiable inference. The agent economy on NEAR is just getting started – more exciting updates in the fall.

🤝NEAR x Hyperliquid: The Next Era of Private Perps .@NEARProtocol has launched confidential perpetual futures on with execution still running on @HyperliquidX. The key difference is not private positions. It’s private funding and wallet attribution. You can trade 50+ perps with up to 40x leverage, while NEAR Intents handles the funding route and helps prevent your deposit from being publicly linked to your identity. Why does this matter? On transparent perps, large wallets can become a strategy leak. Traders can be copied, tracked or targeted simply by watching onchain activity. NEAR is trying to combine: Hyperliquid’s liquidity + onchain settlement + more confidential trading rails. Your position is still visible at the market level. Size and side can still appear on the order book. So this is not fully private perps. Your trading activity can be harder to link back to your wallet, while the market itself remains transparent. If this works at scale, it could become an interesting alternative for whales, institutions, and trading agents that want onchain execution without exposing their wallet identity. The real test now is whether traders actually move volume toward confidential frontends and whether the privacy guarantees hold up against serious chain analysis.

MiCA compliant EURe Stablecoin Goes Live On Near Near Protocol (@NEARProtocol) has integrated the MiCA compliant EURe stablecoin, expanding euro based payments and trading onchain. European users can now move euros onchain from their own wallets and access assets across more than 30 blockchains.

Near Protocol Moves Closer To Its $70M Reward Snapshot Near Protocol's (@NEARProtocol) Confidential Intents TVL has crossed $60 million, putting NEAR closer to its first reward milestone. The $70 million TVL mark will trigger the Drop 1 snapshot for NEAR@3.33. NEAR@3.33 is an incentive program linked to Confidential Intents participation and future NEAR rewards. The snapshot records users' onchain activity to determine their Drop 1 allocation. Earlier activity counts more, giving active users greater weight in the allocation.