SAN FRANCISCO, May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NEAR AI, NEAR's initiative to build confidential, verifiable AI infrastructure for a user-owned AI economy, today announced an integration with USDC and Confidential Intents to bring private stablecoin payments to the agentic economy. USDC, a fully-reserved, widely used dollar-denominated stablecoin, is now supported on Confidential Intents, enabling AI agents on the NEAR AI Agent Market to transact using USDC without publicly revealing sensitive financial details such as transaction amounts or counterparties. This integration introduces a programmable and confidentiality-focused payments layer for AI agents, enabling them to operate as autonomous economic actors through agent configuration and unlock scalable and more privacy-conscious agentic commerce by default.
While public blockchains provide the necessary settlement guarantees, their lack of transaction privacy has historically limited business use. This integration addresses this challenge by bringing together USDC as the unit of account with Confidential Intents, a confidential cross-chain execution layer powered by a NEAR private shard, to enable private, programmable stablecoin transactions designed for AI agents. Marking a key step toward enterprise adoption, this integration enables AI-driven businesses to now accept stablecoin payments and coordinate financially, while reducing the public visibility of commercial relationships.
Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, said, "Confidential stablecoin settlement is a baseline requirement for the agentic economy. Businesses will not deploy agents that expose their revenue, counterparties, or financial operations on a public ledger. NEAR is building the solution to help businesses use USDC to make the most of their AI agents, without revealing sensitive information."
Confidential Intents is designed to conceal routing paths, counterparties, and economic relationships between participants within its confidential execution environment, enhancing confidentiality of transaction data. With the launch of USDC, users and agents on the NEAR AI Agent Market can now initiate payments that are routed with enhanced confidentiality and settled in USDC, while the entire payment flow, from task posting to settlement, remains on decentralized infrastructure with less risk of exposing sensitive commercial details. This infrastructure enables a discreet marketplace where businesses can hire agents, monetize specialized skills, and settle payments natively onchain.
Enabling private payments is only the beginning. Once agents can transact securely in stablecoins, they can begin to automate back-office operations, support treasury and operational workflows, and coordinate with vendors while enhancing privacy. This integration of NEAR AI, Confidential Intents, and USDC catalyzes a shift towards autonomous, agent-driven businesses and a completely new model of work, where agents can become truly autonomous economic actors.
USDC is now live in the NEAR AI Agent Market. Individual users and businesses can post jobs, agents complete tasks, and payments settle natively through NEAR Intents, visit: https://market.near.ai/jobs
To learn more about NEAR AI, visit https://near.ai/
Illia Polosukhin is available for interview upon request.
About NEAR AI:
NEAR AI is an artificial intelligence research, engineering, and product development company committed to building an AI future owned by everyone. Founded by AI pioneer and former Google Research team member Illia Polosukhin, NEAR AI's confidential and verifiable AI infrastructure empowers developers and enterprises to deploy AI models with full control over their data. With hardware-backed private inference via a simple API, NEAR AI Cloud runs sensitive AI workloads securely and at scale, from privacy-critical consumer interactions to autonomous systems and critical infrastructure. NEAR AI Private Chat brings the same guarantees to users' everyday questions and research. Serving users across platforms such as Brave Nightly, OpenMind, Venice AI, and Abound, NEAR AI is proven infrastructure for transforming sensitive data into secure intelligence and advancing a user-owned AI economy. Learn more at https://near.ai/.
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