Confidential transactions and a secure runtime for AI agents signal NEAR’s transition from a high-performance blockchain to a combined execution and economic layer for self-governing markets.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 — NEAR has introduced a comprehensive infrastructure stack that merges blockchain and AI, featuring universal cross-chain execution, confidential transactions, hardware-protected AI agents, integrated revenue sharing, and a user-friendly multichain super-app.
These announcements represent a fundamental change for the protocol, revealed at NEARCON this week in San Francisco: NEAR’s premier AI conference, which attracted top figures from OpenAI, Google, Intel, AWS, Oracle, and Brave. Instead of functioning as just another high-speed Layer 1, NEAR now serves as a unified commerce layer for onchain markets and autonomous agents.
Near.com is a consumer-oriented super-app driven by NEAR Intents. This interface links over 35 blockchains via a single account, allowing for cross-chain swaps, peer-to-peer settlement, and optional confidential transaction flows without the need for manual bridging or routing. This launch establishes NEAR as an execution layer that removes the complexity of blockchain fragmentation while keeping users in full control of their wallets.
Integrated into NEAR Intents, Confidential Intents offers a limited-visibility setting for cross-chain transactions. Both individual users and institutions can choose confidentiality for transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, while still ensuring their actions are verifiable onchain. Confidential Intents addresses a core limitation in DeFi, especially for institutions requiring privacy to prevent frontrunning and the replication of their strategies.
NEAR also presented IronClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime that deploys agents within encrypted enclaves on the NEAR AI Cloud. IronClaw enables users to operate always-on AI agents with hardware-guaranteed confidentiality, safeguarding credentials from host operators and other infrastructure intermediaries. This launch responds to the rising demand for secure AI infrastructure as autonomous agents like OpenClaw take on more sensitive tasks.
NEAR also debuted its Confidential GPU Marketplace, a TEE-secured computing network built for enterprise and government AI workloads. Jobs run inside encrypted enclaves, with hardware-signed attestation provided in under 30 seconds. GPU operators are unable to access memory during processing, permitting work with sensitive data without exposing it to cloud intermediaries. This marketplace lets data centers profit from unused capacity while offering enterprises confidential inference capabilities without the cost of building dedicated infrastructure.
Underpinning this entire stack is Nightshade 3.0, the latest advancement of NEAR Protocol, which brings the separation of consensus and execution, atomic transactions, and a live private shard. Nightshade 3.0 allows NEAR’s architecture to scale beyond 1 million+ transactions per second while incorporating new privacy features at the protocol level.
Finally, NEAR is moving towards a sustainable tokenomics model to enhance value capture for its ecosystem, starting with the Intents Revenue Share, an automatic revenue-sharing system for integration partners. As the use of Intents grows across third-party distribution channels, protocol revenue grows correspondingly. Governed by the community and adhering to compliance rules, revenue from NEAR products can be used for $NEAR token buybacks, buyback-and-earn programs, and other treasury measures to foster the ecosystem’s long-term development. NEAR Intents has already facilitated over $1 million in $NEAR buybacks. Furthermore, increasing native frontend usage for NEAR Intents via near.com is a significant growth catalyst for the protocol and could boost value capture for the NEAR ecosystem. Collectively, these mechanisms are designed to transform NEAR into a unified economic stack that positions $NEAR as the cornerstone of a user-owned internet and AI economy.
“For AI agents to function independently in real-world markets, they require universal execution, hardware-backed security, and a settlement layer capable of scaling for global demand,” stated Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. “This week, NEAR showed how we are assembling these elements. We are merging blockchain and AI into a single commerce layer where agents can securely transact and act on a global scale.”
Together, these launches transform NEAR from a high-performance blockchain into cohesive infrastructure for autonomous markets. Cross-chain execution, confidential computing, and protocol-level value capture now function within a unified framework designed to remove complexity while guaranteeing user sovereignty and verifiability.
As AI agents start to transact, negotiate, and execute across onchain markets, unified liquidity, confidentiality, and economic alignment become essential infrastructure needs. With near.com, Confidential Intents, IronClaw, the Confidential GPU Marketplace, and sustainable tokenomics, NEAR now integrates these vital components into a single, cohesive architecture.
Illia Polosukhin is available for interview upon request
About NEARCON:
NEARCON is the leading working forum where top AI researchers, financial institutions, and infrastructure builders tackle rigorous, system-level challenges seldom addressed at mainstream AI and finance events. The focus is on issues at the crossroads of computing, agentic decision-making, and economic systems, in an exclusive, interdisciplinary environment that brings together senior experts 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 that unlocks asset liquidity and enables agents to transact autonomously. NEAR’s technology stack combines NEAR Intents for one-click cross-chain execution, NEAR AI for protected intelligence, and sharded blockchain infrastructure for scalability beyond 1 million+ TPS, facilitating universal trading across cryptocurrency, traditional assets, and the AI economy. Having processed over $13B in multi-chain volume and served millions of users across consumer and enterprise AI platforms, NEAR is the foundational layer connecting blockchain and agentic markets. Assets, agents, commerce, unified. Learn more at near.com.
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.