Near Protocol (NEAR)

In 2017, Illia Polosukhin co-authored a paper that changed the world. The paper was titled Attention Is All You Need, and it introduced the Transformer architecture, the neural network design that powers GPT, BERT, Claude, Gemini, and every major large language model in existence. The Transformer did not merely advance artificial intelligence. It created the foundation on which the entire generative AI revolution was built. Every chatbot, every image generator, every code assistant, every AI agent in operation today runs on the architecture Polosukhin helped invent.

In 2018, Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, a distributed systems engineer who had built infrastructure at Microsoft and MemSQL, founded NEAR Protocol with a thesis that was as simple as it was ambitious: blockchain technology would not achieve mass adoption until it became invisible to the user. The average person does not understand hexadecimal addresses, gas fees, or private key management. The average person wants to send money, own an asset, or use an application. NEAR was designed to make blockchain as easy to use as the internet itself.

NEAR launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020, with one billion NEAR tokens at genesis. From the first day, the user experience reflected the founders’ thesis.

Human-readable accounts like alice.near replaced the hexadecimal strings that every other blockchain imposed on its users. Transaction fees averaged $0.002. The protocol handled account recovery, key rotation, and gas abstraction with a sophistication that made the blockchain layer invisible to the end user. The technology was advanced. The experience was simple. This combination, which no other Layer-1 had achieved at scale, drove NEAR to 46 million monthly active users by May 2025, making it the second-largest Layer-1 by this metric.

NEAR’s core technical innovation is Nightshade sharding. The network is divided into parallel shards, each producing chunks that are assembled into single blocks. The Nightshade 2.0 upgrade in May 2025 expanded the network to six active shards, reduced block times to 600 milliseconds, and achieved 1.2-second transaction finality. The network processes an average of 80 transactions per second in production, with testnet peaks exceeding 4,000 TPS. This is not theoretical capacity on a whitepaper. It is measured production throughput on a live network serving 46 million monthly active users.

The Doomslug proof-of-stake consensus issues five percent of total supply annually as epoch rewards, with 90 percent going to validators and 10 percent to the protocol treasury. Seventy percent of transaction fees are burned, creating deflationary pressure that partially offsets the issuance.

The remaining 30 percent of fees are paid as rebates to the smart contracts that users interact with, directly incentivizing developers to build useful applications.

This economic design aligns developer incentives with user activity in a way that no other protocol has implemented: the more people use your application, the more the protocol pays you.

NEAR has positioned itself as the blockchain for AI, and Polosukhin’s Transformer credentials give that positioning a credibility no other blockchain can match.

The NEAR AI research center, established in November 2025, supports models with 1.4 trillion parameters and a user-owned AI assistant that operates across Web2 and Web3.

The AI ecosystem includes more than 50 specialized teams. NEAR Intents enable the exchange of information, requests, assets, and actions between AI agents, services, and users, creating the infrastructure for an economy in which AI agents transact autonomously on behalf of their users.

Chain Signatures allow NEAR smart contracts to sign transactions on any blockchain, making NEAR a coordination layer for cross-chain AI activity.

The ecosystem is built for accessibility. Smart contracts can be written in JavaScript and Rust. MetaMask and Phantom wallets are compatible. Three accelerator programs, two AI-focused and one Chain Abstraction, have produced participants raising $50.5 million in external funding. Circle’s USDC is natively available.

The Rainbow Bridge provides seamless NEAR-Ethereum asset transfers. Circulating supply is approximately 1.29 billion NEAR, with 44.9 percent staked across 254 validators.

NEAR has delivered on its founding thesis more completely than perhaps any other Layer-1 in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Forty-six million monthly active users. Sixteen million weekly active users, up 18.4 percent week-over-week. Q3 2024 averaged approximately 3 million daily active users. Daily transactions exceeded 8 million in 2024, doubling from the start of the year. Average transaction fees of $0.002. These are not speculative metrics. These are consumer-facing applications with tens of millions of real users.

The key applications demonstrate the breadth: KAIKAI by Cosmose AI reached 31.7 million monthly active users through curated lock-screen content with token rewards.

Here Wallet serves 4.2 million users. Sweat Economy converts physical movement into crypto rewards for 1.6 million users. Playember hosts 500,000 users. DeFi total value locked grew fivefold from $88 million to $430 million in 2024. Stablecoin inflows surged to $700 million, a twenty-fold year-over-year increase. NEAR is listed on every major exchange: Binance, Coinbase (number 18 most popular, 95 percent buying), OKX, Gate.io, Huobi, KuCoin, Kraken, Crypto.com, and Revolut.

Where NEAR has fallen short is in converting extraordinary user metrics into proportionate market valuation. Its market capitalization of approximately $1.5 billion is approximately 94 percent below the all-time high of $20.44.

Application concentration risk is significant: KAIKAI accounts for 31.7 million of the 46 million MAU, meaning a single application drives the majority of the user metric. The five percent annual token issuance creates ongoing dilution that lacks the hard scarcity of Bitcoin, DigiByte, or Nano. And the market capitalization-to-TVL ratio of 22.2 suggests that the token may be overvalued relative to DeFi usage even as it appears profoundly undervalued relative to its user base.

NEAR Protocol is the strongest fundamental case among evaluated coins outside of Bitcoin itself. The composite score of 0.280251 exceeds every other coin by a wide margin.

The transaction ratio of 0.493 means NEAR processes nearly half as many transactions as Bitcoin despite having a market capitalization that is one-thousandth the size. The developer ratio of 0.552 means NEAR has more than half as many active developers as Bitcoin, funded by accelerators, the protocol treasury, and the gravitational pull of Polosukhin’s Transformer credentials.

The AI-blockchain convergence that NEAR is positioning for represents one of the largest technological and economic opportunities of the next decade. NEAR Intents, which enable AI agents to transact autonomously across chains, could create an entirely new category of on-chain economic activity that does not yet exist in the market’s valuation models.

The Google Universal Commerce Platform integration, making NEAR the first blockchain for autonomous AI agent payments, positions the protocol at the intersection of the two most important technology trends of the 2020s.

The market values NEAR at $1.58 billion. The CFV model values it at $555.7 billion. The gap exists because the market prices NEAR based on its 94 percent decline from all-time high and its position in the broader altcoin selloff. The CFV model prices it based on 20 million holders, 3 billion annual transactions, $100 billion in adjusted transaction value, and 500 developers building at the frontier of AI and blockchain. The co-inventor of the architecture that powers every major AI system on Earth built a blockchain that processes 8 million transactions per day for 46 million users, and the market values the entire enterprise at less than the annual revenue of a mid-size software company. The intelligent investor will note the disparity and draw the obvious conclusion.