The NEAR Foundation (NF) is proud to announce the inaugural NEAR AI Agent Fund, which will focus on scaling the development of fully autonomous and verifiable agents built on NEAR technology. The $20M liquid fund will be deployed onchain over the next few months into agent tokens powering novel decentralized AI use cases and mass market consumer solutions.
The recent surge in onchain mindshare for agents is just the beginning of the convergence of crypto and AI. The NEAR ecosystem shares the conviction that AI agents are the future of commerce and business. The onchain design space for agents is vast, but remains largely untapped so far. But with NEAR Intents and NEAR AI’s agent infrastructure, the NEAR ecosystem is primed to fuel innovation in this arena. The Web3 agent design space will continue to expand and the NEAR Foundation AI Agent Fund will help builders accelerate ideas that are uniquely possible on NEAR.
The Foundation is looking to invest in agent tokens that push the boundaries of the onchain agentic design space beyond the basic social poster agents. NF will explore working with ecosystems like Sky, Frax, and more on accelerating the launch of novel use cases powered by AI agents that can unlock new flows of value. Some experiments the fund would be excited to support include agent tokenisation, agent-curated order flow, fully on-chain gaming with AI characters, permissionless AI oracles, agent curated savings accounts, financial entertainment, market maker agents, and social onboarding.
By creating this agent fund, the Foundation hopes to bring more builders onboard to the exciting possibilities unlocked by NEAR’s tech at the intersection of crypto and AI. NEAR’s fully verifiable AI agent development stack includes some unique core primitives that offer a full spectrum of developer tooling options. These include off-chain and cross-chain commitments with NEAR Intents, multi-party computation (MPC) based key management and trust minimized bridging with Chain Signatures, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) for agents to run securely.
NEAR is purpose-built to drive innovation and propel adoption of open-source, User Owned AI, empowering users to control their own data and assets while enabling personalized AI use cases that make their lives better and easier. Today’s popular AI interfaces, both closed-source and open source, lack transparency in both how models are trained and how user data is utilized. The NEAR ecosystem envisions a future in which groundbreaking AI and the sovereignty of communities and individuals are not at odds, but rather symbiotic––leading to new economic opportunities, novel business models, and a diverse technology landscape no longer controlled by a few mega-corporations.
The agent fund will complement other builder-focused initiatives in the NEAR ecosystem including the Horizon AI accelerator cohorts and AI hackathons, empowering the next generation of founders and projects pushing the boundaries of AI and Web3.
Builders interested in creating experimental agents and AI tokens can get started here.
