Author: Jae, PANews
Narratives may change, but Near remains constant. From high-performance public chains and sharding to chain abstraction, Intents, and now the hottest AI Agent, Near has almost never been absent from any mainstream narrative in the past few crypto cycles.
Backed by Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the classic AI Transformer paper and known as "the most AI expert in the Web3 field," Near has delivered an unexpectedly strong performance even during the bear market. Today, Near is a cross-chain infrastructure giant that has processed over $20 billion in cross-chain transactions and generated over $34 million in transaction fees.
Few people know that Near's creation didn't stem from a grand blockchain ideal, but rather from a somewhat embarrassing reality: the inability to pay cross-border salaries. Eight years ago, in order to solve the problem of paying developers across borders globally, Illia Polosukhin's AI startup was forced to pause its AI dream and instead create a public blockchain.
Now, as the AI craze sweeps the globe, this public blockchain, born of AI and once paved the way for AI, has returned to the starting point of its story.
The payroll problem unexpectedly spurred the creation of public blockchains, which are now returning to the AI arena.
History sometimes has a strange cycle. Nine years ago, Illia Polosukhin was not yet one of the most AI-labeled founders in the crypto industry.
Near was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the Transformer paper and a former Google machine learning researcher, and Alexander Skidanov, a distributed systems expert.
Near was originally an artificial intelligence startup focused on "program synthesis," which is essentially "teaching machines to write code" to automate software development. Its concept was similar to that of OpenAI's CodeX, Anthropic's Claude Code, and Cursor.
To train the algorithm and model, the team recruited computer science students worldwide to write code snippets remotely. However, how to pay the developers scattered around the world became a major obstacle for the project.
The cross-border payment system at the time was far less mature than it is today. Mainstream payment tools such as PayPal and Wise faced severe constraints in Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, with frequent issues of delayed payments and exchange rate losses. Interestingly, when the two founders tried using early public blockchains for cross-border payments, they discovered that the high gas fees and low settlement efficiency made it impossible to distribute labor remuneration in bulk at low cost.
For an AI startup with limited resources, this was almost an unsolvable problem. Ultimately, the two founders, who had backgrounds in large-scale distributed systems, made a surprising decision: to shelve the development of the AI model and instead build a highly scalable, low-cost, and easy-to-use public blockchain.
It was the passive transformation triggered by the inability to pay salaries that gave birth to the "Near public chain" in 2018.
However, the early transition was not smooth sailing. After leaving the AI track, Near turned to developing a high-performance public chain focused on sharding technology to solve the scalability problem of blockchain.
With its solid technical capabilities, the Near protocol secured over $500 million in funding during this period. However, in the fiercely competitive public blockchain arena, Near failed to create a phenomenal benchmark application or attract a large influx of developers. Its ecosystem was sparse, user growth stagnated, and market attention was low. In an environment teeming with "Ethereum killers," even with its leading sharding architecture, Near's attention was consistently diverted to other popular public blockchains, and the protocol entered a period of silence characterized by critical acclaim but lack of commercial success.
During the bull market of 2020-2021, Near caught the cross-chain trend, and the launch of Rainbow Bridge became an important catalyst for its ecosystem explosion and soaring coin price.
Until the AI boom, Near's fate took a turn for the better. In March 2024, at the GTC Global Developer Conference, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang invited seven co-authors of the Transformer paper, including Illia Polosukhin, to the stage for a discussion.
Jensen Huang praised the paper, saying it "changed the world," emphasizing that the Transformer architecture is the foundation of all achievements in the AI industry, and its influence has reshaped the global technology, content, and financial landscape. This moment of glory has once again brought Illia Polosukhin, a co-creator, and Near, whose AI dream ended, back into the spotlight as legitimate "AI lineage" figures in the crypto market.
Returning to the battlefield with a fresh look, Near's unique "technological core" has been further activated. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the protocol is transforming towards Near Intents and private transactions, laying a solid foundation for the integration of multi-chain intents and the Agent Economy.
The intent transaction layer significantly lowers the interaction threshold for AI agents, enabling agents such as Venice AI, deployed in confidential hardware TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments), to autonomously, securely, and at low cost conduct multi-chain fund transfers.
Near Intents become a new growth driver, raking in $20 billion in transactions.
Near Intents reshapes the interactive experience of cross-chain transactions. In a traditional multi-chain environment, users need to manually operate the cross-chain bridge, prepare different Gas tokens on the source and target chains, and constantly guard against slippage and transaction costs when exchanging cross-chain assets.
Near uses an intent mechanism to abstract the entire process. Users only need to express their transaction needs, such as "exchange BTC on the source chain for ETH on the target chain," without needing to solve cross-chain paths and gas consumption. This is the kind of interactive experience that ordinary users, and even future AI agents, are pursuing.
The execution of cross-chain transactions relies on the bidding mechanism of the off-chain solver network.
When a user issues an intent request, the solver network bids through the solver bus, automatically finding and calculating the optimal execution path and price.
Once a user signs a quote, the intent is to submit it to the Verifier smart contract on the Near chain for final settlement.
Throughout the entire process, gas fees are automatically deducted in the background, allowing users to pay seamlessly and effectively unleashing the potential of DeFi cross-chain transactions. This significant improvement in user experience has enabled Near to achieve widespread integration with traffic portals such as Ledger.
However, the potential centralization of solver networks is also a significant risk. Because solvers require ample market-making liquidity and complex algorithmic optimization, trading APIs like 1Click typically rely on trusted exchange brokers and leading market makers. This could lead to an oligopoly in the solver market, weakening the price advantage inherent in the original auction mechanism.
According to DeFi Llama data, Near Intents has been deployed on 25 public blockchains, covering the major settlement networks in the crypto market.
The protocol's TVL (Total Value Locked) exceeds $85 million, with $36.5 million held on the Near Chain and substantial liquidity established on chains like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Tron through chain abstraction mechanisms. This breadth of cross-chain ecosystem is key to Near Intents' cumulative transaction volume surpassing the $20 billion mark.
From a profitability perspective, since the launch of Near Intents, the protocol has generated over $33 million in transaction fees. More than 70% of that revenue has come from the last two quarters. This indicates that as the multi-chain ecosystem continues to expand, the protocol's profitability is also showing an upward trend.
The gradually increasing transaction fee revenue will establish a positive feedback mechanism for NEAR's economy. The vast majority of network fees will be burned, injecting deflationary momentum into the NEAR token and further strengthening its value capture capability.
Private transactions consume 40% of traffic: a growth engine or a regulatory hazard?
Currently, with the increasing on-chain activity, privacy needs are no longer a marginalized requirement in the crypto market, which has become a differentiating advantage for Near.
Since launching its "Confidential Intents" and "Confidential Swaps" features in the first quarter of this year, Near's adoption rate has risen rapidly. In the past 30 days, the total transaction volume on the Near chain reached $209 million, with Confidential Swaps accounting for $87 million, or 41.63%. This data reflects not only product adoption but also the real existence of market demand.
Behind Near's explosive growth lies its address of a long-standing structural pain point in the DeFi market: the highly transparent on-chain ledger exposes the positions and intentions of large traders. This leads to serious issues such as sandwich effects (MEV), significant slippage, and strategy leaks when institutions or whales execute large transactions.
The Private Intent feature introduces programmable privacy technology, allowing users to seamlessly switch to "Private Mode" on the front-end interface. In this mode, the amount, direction, and position of a transaction are completely hidden from the outside world during execution, and are only recorded in verifiable cryptographic records on-chain during settlement.
The robot's clamps failed, and the traders' trade secrets were preserved. The private exchange feature will open up a relatively secure DeFi channel for institutional funds, reduce transaction friction, and facilitate the integration of the on-chain ecosystem with mainstream finance.
However, the other side of the coin cannot be ignored. The fact that over 40% of transactions are privacy-focused demonstrates the real demand, but it may also attract regulatory scrutiny. Global regulatory pressure on privacy protocols like Tornado Cash has never eased. Anonymous, large-scale fund transfers are more likely to trigger regulatory enforcement. If regulators determine that the "private exchange" model poses a risk of money laundering, Near may inevitably come under regulatory scrutiny, potentially becoming one of its biggest uncertainties for the future.
Looking back on its nine-year journey, Near's growth story has unfolded in a highly dramatic fashion. Despite experiencing public chain competition, market cycles, and narrative shifts, it has continuously adjusted its development direction.
Today, chain abstraction, Intents, and privacy transactions have become new areas of exploration for Near, while the AI boom has led the market to re-examine the unique background of this public chain. However, whether these attempts can help Near build a more solid ecological moat still needs more time to observe.
