An agent that acts as a real economic participant needs several capabilities at once: ✦ Identity and permissions, scoped and durable ✦ Settlement at machine speed and micro scale ✦ Private inference ✦ Confidential execution ✦ Verifiability ✦ Universal liquidity ✦ Discovery and coordination Two other factors determined whether the economy around those agents persists: ✦ Transparent governance: the more agents depend on a system, the more its rules have to be legible and contestable. ✦ Sustainable economics: usage funds security, rather than emissions that eventually run out. No single product or platform delivers across all those requirements. Today the model, settlement, and governance sit with different, uncoordinated parties. Coordinating them into one open stack is the gap NEAR is building to fill: