Near.com, confidential transactions, and a secure runtime for AI agents mark NEAR's evolution beyond a high-performance blockchain into an integrated execution and economic layer for autonomous markets
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NEAR has launched an integrated blockchain and AI infrastructure stack combining universal cross-chain execution, confidential transactions, hardware-secured AI agents, built-in revenue sharing, and a consumer-friendly multichain super-app.
The releases mark a structural shift for the protocol, which were unveiled at NEARCON this week in San Francisco: NEAR's flagship AI conference, which drew industry leaders from OpenAI, Google, Intel, AWS, Oracle, and Brave. Rather than another high-throughput Layer 1, NEAR now operates as a unified commerce layer for onchain markets and autonomous agents.
near.com is a consumer-facing super-app powered by NEAR Intents. The interface connects more than 35 blockchains through a single account, enabling cross-chain swaps, peer-to-peer settlement, and optional confidential transaction flows without manual bridging or routing. The launch positions NEAR as an execution layer that abstracts away blockchain fragmentation while ensuring users remain in control of their wallets.
Built into NEAR Intents, Confidential Intents provides a restricted-visibility environment for cross-chain transactions. Users and institutions can opt into confidentiality across transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, while maintaining verifiable onchain execution. Confidential Intents solves a structural limitation of DeFi, particularly for institutions that need confidentiality to mitigate frontrunning and strategy copying.
NEAR also introduced IronClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime that deploys agents inside encrypted enclaves on NEAR AI Cloud. IronClaw empowers users to run always-on AI agents with hardware-enforced confidentiality, protecting credentials from host operators and infrastructure intermediaries. The release reflects growing demand for secure AI infrastructure as autonomous agents such as OpenClaw increasingly handle sensitive workflows.
NEAR also launched its Confidential GPU Marketplace, a TEE-secured compute network designed for enterprise and government AI workloads. Jobs execute inside encrypted enclaves, with hardware-signed attestation delivered in under 30 seconds. GPU operators cannot access memory in transit, enabling workloads involving sensitive data without exposing it to cloud intermediaries. The marketplace allows data centers to monetize idle capacity while giving enterprises access to confidential inference without having to build out expensive proprietary infrastructure.
Supporting this whole stack is Nightshade 3.0, the next evolution of NEAR Protocol, which introduces separation of consensus and execution, atomic transactions, and a live private shard. Nightshade 3.0 enables NEAR architecture to scale beyond 1M+ TPS while adding new privacy primitives at the protocol level.
Finally, NEAR is evolving toward a holistic economic approach to increase value capture for the NEAR ecosystem, beginning with the NEAR Intents fee switch, an automatic revenue-sharing mechanism with integration partners. As Intents usage scales across third-party distribution channels, protocol revenue scales with it. Through governance and subject to compliance requirements, NEAR product revenues can be deployed for buybacks of $NEAR, buyback and earn, and other treasury actions to support the long-term growth of the ecosystem. NEAR Intents has already directed revenue to 1M+ in $NEAR buyback. Additionally, expanding native frontend usage for NEAR Intents through near.com is a powerful growth driver for the protocol and may increase value capture for the NEAR ecosystem. Altogether, these mechanisms are intended to NEAR into a unified economic stack that ensures $NEAR is the anchor for a user-owned internet and AI economy.
"For AI agents to operate autonomously in real markets, they need universal execution, hardware-enforced security, and a settlement layer that can scale to handle global workloads," said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. "This week, NEAR demonstrated how we're bringing these components together. We are converging blockchain and AI into a unified commerce layer where agents can transact and take actions securely, at global scale."
Together, these releases elevate NEAR from a high-performance blockchain into integrated infrastructure for autonomous markets. Cross-chain execution, confidential compute, and protocol-level value capture now operate within a unified architecture designed to abstract away complexity while ensuring user sovereignty and verifiability.
As AI agents begin to transact, negotiate, and execute across onchain markets, unified liquidity, confidentiality, and economic alignment become core infrastructure requirements. With near.com, Confidential Intents, IronClaw, the Confidential GPU Marketplace, and sustainable tokenomics, NEAR now brings these critical pieces together into a unified architecture.
Illia Polosukhin is available for interview upon request
About NEARCON:
NEARCON is the premier working forum for leading AI researchers, financial institutions, and infrastructure builders to engage with rigorous, system-level challenges that rarely have a home at mainstream AI and finance industry events. The focus is on questions at the intersection of computing, agentic decision-making, and economic systems in an invite-only, intimate interdisciplinary setting that includes senior researchers and practitioners from major AI labs, financial institutions, enterprise infrastructure providers, and open-source foundations. This year's theme is Building an AI Economy Without Compromise.
About NEAR:
NEAR is the unified commerce layer for unlocking asset liquidity and empowering agents to autonomously transact. NEAR's technology stack integrates NEAR Intents for one-click cross-chain execution, NEAR AI for shielded intelligence, and sharded blockchain infrastructure for 1M+ TPS scalability, enabling universal trading across crypto, traditional assets, and the AI economy. With $13B+ in multi-chain volume and millions of users served across consumer and enterprise AI platforms, NEAR is the foundation connecting blockchain and agentic markets. Assets, agents, commerce, unified. Learn more at https://www.near.org/.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this communication constitutes investment advice, a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any token or other financial instrument. The strategies, tools and approaches discussed are subject to change and may be modified or discontinued at any time based on regulatory developments, governance decisions and other factors.
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