In 2025, NEAR expanded far beyond the boundaries of a traditional Layer-1 blockchain to become a universal execution layer for cross-chain DeFi and the fast-emerging Agentic Economy. With major protocol upgrades, cross-chain innovation, and the launch of verifiably private AI, NEAR’s stack now unifies three critical technologies: sharded blockchain infrastructure, intent-driven cross-chain execution, and hardware-backed private intelligence. Together, these technologies enable high-throughput, secure, and seamless execution across a wide range of markets, from DeFi to AI.

The Agentic Economy describes the shift from human-driven workflows to autonomous AI agents that act on users’ behalf: booking flights, allocating capital, performing maintenance, generating insights, and executing transactions across chains and platforms. This era is no longer theoretical. According to McKinsey’s State of AI in 2025 survey, 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, and as the agent-driven economy accelerates, NEAR’s mission is to provide scalable rails for agentic payments and ensure that intelligence is user-owned.

Below is a review of the milestones that defined NEAR’s monumental year and a forward-looking view of the foundation being built for 2026 and beyond.

NEAR Protocol: Sharded Scalability for Global Usage

In a publicly verifiable benchmark, NEAR achieved 1 million transactions per second (TPS) using NEAR core code, affordable consumer-grade hardware, and publicly verifiable scripts. This milestone, detailed in the official benchmark report and the NEAR One team’s technical deep dive, demonstrates that sharded infrastructure can scale horizontally for high-load dApps and well beyond the throughput of traditional payment networks.

The expansion from 6 to 9 shards on mainnet increased network throughput by 50% and laid the groundwork for dynamic resharding as load and agent-driven activity continue to rise. More shards mean more parallelism and more headroom for execution-layer growth across Intents and AI. With resharding successfully implemented, NEAR protocol has a straightforward pathway for continuing to add more shards and scale capacity.

With the launch of 600 millisecond block time, NEAR has introduced a new benchmark  for high-performance blockchains. With NEAR’s Doomslug consensus design, having one block built on top provides a substantial finality guarantee and a slashable malicious attack is required to revert the previous block. This upgrade reduced latency by 2x to ensure higher-frequency processing for apps that require near real-time speed.

Finality now occurs in 1.2 seconds, making NEAR one of the fastest settlement layers in the industry and enabling agents to sequence, verify, and finalize actions across chains with minimal latency.

In addition to these performance breakthroughs, NEAR shipped sharded smart contracts on mainnet, implemented global contracts, and expanded the maximum number of validators from 300 to 500, strengthening decentralization and execution capacity. The full history of core upgrades this year is available in the NEAR Core release notes.

NEAR Intents: The Leading Cross-Chain Execution Layer

Fastest-growing cross-chain infrastructure

NEAR Intents is now the fastest-growing cross-chain infrastructure, enabling one-click swaps, unified liquidity, and universal execution across markets from DeFi to AI. Using an outcome-driven transaction architecture and a solver-based settlement mechanism, Intents is becoming a widely adopted infrastructure layer for seamless cross-chain swaps and helping enable agentic commerce.

Intents surpassed $7B in all-time cross-chain volume, reflecting accelerating adoption among wallets, liquidity protocols, and emerging agent platforms. Intents’ steadily growing volume demonstrates that cross-chain demand is converging around low-cost and unified liquidity networks rather than isolated bridges and centralized providers.

With over 13M total swaps, NEAR Intents has become the widely adopted cross-chain execution layer for traders, wallets, arbitrage systems, and more. Intents’ architecture removes the complexity for users traditionally associated with cross-chain execution, replacing it with a single, declarative intent.

Intents now connects 25+ major blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Zcash, and others, providing expansive cross-chain coverage. Across the multi-chain ecosystem, NEAR Intents now supports over 1.6M unique users. 

NEAR AI: Verifiable, Private Intelligence at Scale

The launch of NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat introduced a new category of privacy-first intelligence for both enterprises and consumers. Developers can now deploy models that keep user data encrypted end-to-end, solving one of the most significant challenges in enterprise AI adoption.

NEAR AI infrastructure is now supporting deployments serving 100M+ users through integrations with Brave Nightly, OpenMind, and the next-generation travel management platform TravAI, which also leverages NEAR Intents. These integrations demonstrate real-world scale and the growing demand for verifiable AI execution.

SovereignAI (Nasdaq: SVRN) launched with a NEAR-based digital asset treasury, following its $120M PIPE investment. This marks one of the most notable examples of institutional adoption of NEAR-powered AI infrastructure to date.

At NVIDIA GTC 2025, NEAR Co-Founder Illia Polosukhin introduced NEAR’s new research, Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning (DCML). DCML is a novel approach to training, fine-tuning, and utilizing AI models and agents that ensures verifiability while protecting users’ data, and that empowers open-source AI developers and researchers to monetize their work. Watch Illia’s full GTC 2025 presentation: “Confidential and Verifiable AI Computing.” 

Governance and Economics: A New Era of Participation and Incentive Alignment

House of Stake went live as NEAR’s decentralized governance body to strengthen community-driven decision-making and align long-term incentives across the network. House of Stake is pioneering AI-driven governance mechanisms and is partnering with Stanford OpenLab on joint AI governance research. The NEAR community has successfully passed several binding Decision proposals through House of Stake for validator support and veNEAR holder incentives.

NEAR completed its Halving Upgrade, reducing maximum annual inflation by 50% to establish a more sustainable tokenomics framework and long-term incentive alignment across the ecosystem during NEAR Protocol’s next growth phase of productization and real-world usage. 

Ecosystem Expansion: Distribution Across Chains, Wallets, and Financial Institutions

2025 marked a dramatic expansion of NEAR’s distribution footprint.

Beyond the 25+ chains that NEAR Intents now connects, wallet integrations expanded significantly, including Ledger, Zashi, Trust Wallet, OneKey, CoolWallet, SafePal, Bitget Wallet, Coin98, Ellipal, Keystone, Zypto, Ctrl, Hasher Wallet, and ThorWallet.

Major projects such as CoW Swap, ThorSwap, Rango Exchange, ShapeShift, Rubic Exchange, Infinex, and infrastructure partners such as SwapKit, HOT Bridge, and Rhea all integrated NEAR Intents, broadening NEAR’s execution reach across retail and institutional audiences.

This breadth of distribution is a key growth driver: NEAR is not a single-ecosystem chain but rather a universal execution layer for numerous ecosystems.

Bitwise, the world’s largest crypto index fund manager with more than $12 billion in assets under management, also launched a NEAR Staking ETP, offering regulated exposure to NEAR and reflecting growing institutional interest in NEAR as an enabling technology both for cross-chain interoperability and AI-native applications. 

Developer Tooling: One Path to Building on NEAR

The NEAR developer ecosystem resources saw significant growth in 2025, with improvements spanning documentation, tooling, and multi-language support. The year kicked off with a consolidated documentation site that streamlined resource discovery and provided clearer pathways for developers at every stage.

Seamless Onboarding and Wallet Innovations

Developer experience took center stage with significant wallet ecosystem enhancements. Developers can now leverage social logins via Privy, dramatically simplifying onboarding for consumer-facing applications. The NEAR Wallet Selector received two major updates with improved DevX, while HOT launched a zero-dependency alternative prioritizing speed and security. These improvements make it easier than ever to integrate wallet functionality into frontend applications.

Expanded Language Support and Tooling

NEAR's commitment to multi-language support materialized with official Python SDK support for smart contracts, plus experimental SDKs for Go, Kotlin, C#, and Elixir. The JavaScript ecosystem saw near-api-js receive a major backend-focused update, complemented by community-driven alternatives like near-kit and near-api-ts. Frontend developers gained React Hooks for the Wallet Selector, while new JSON RPC clients launched for TypeScript, Rust, Kotlin, and Swift. Last but not least, all core tooling (CLIs, APIs, and SDKs) were updated to support Global Smart Contracts.

Community and Infrastructure Growth

Beyond tooling, we invested heavily in our YouTube channel as the primary hub for developer engagement. Through DevHub Lives, NDNA, and detailed Dev Workshops, the channel became a consistent surface for builders to learn, explore new parts of the stack, and see real projects in action. Paired with regular newsletters, this created recurring touchpoints that kept developers connected, informed, and coming back.

2026 Outlook: Accelerating Adoption and Strengthening NEAR Tokenomics

Scaling Integrations and Volume

2026 will focus on capitalizing on the momentum of NEAR Intents and continuing to grow cross-chain volume. NEAR Intents will aim to expand its footprint to provide unified liquidity across more blockchains and assets. In 2026, it is expected that Intents may see adoption beyond its DeFi roots as more financial institutions come on-chain and realize the utility of Intents for clearing and settlement, OTC trading, and other TradFi use cases. 

Scaling distribution is key to the economic model of NEAR Intents. NEAR Intents fees are a combination of protocol fees that flow to NEAR Protocol and distribution fees that flow to both NEAR Protocol and third-party distribution channels. NEAR Intents’ protocol fees are low by design to support ecosystem growth and integrations. Distribution fees are a significant source of revenue, and 2026 is expected to focus on expanding Intents’ distribution channels.  

Beyond Intents adoption, the release of NEAR AI now opens up major integration opportunities with enterprise AI systems. In industries such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, large organizations have rigorous requirements around privacy, sovereignty, compliant model hosting, cost control, and high-performance inference. NEAR AI’s confidential computing infrastructure is designed to meet these enterprise requirements and has begun to bring verifiably private intelligence to the robotics sector. With the confidential computing market expected to reach over $350 billion by 2032, NEAR is expected to play an important role in this fast-growing category. 

Strengthening NEAR Tokenomics and Ecosystem Sustainability

NEAR launched on mainnet over five years ago, and $NEAR is now fully unlocked, making NEAR one of the most mature and transparent cryptoeconomic ecosystems in the industry. With the Halving Upgrade successfully completed and NEAR Intents and other NEAR products generating meaningful revenue flows, the focus is now to enhance NEAR tokenomics. Work is currently underway on an ecosystem sustainability framework—potentially including mechanisms for directing NEAR Intents fees into a community-governed treasury—that is designed to support long-term economic sustainability and strengthen incentive alignment across the ecosystem.

This holistic model of growing ecosystem revenues, strengthening economic sustainability mechanisms, and ensuring sustainable emissions keeps the utility of the $NEAR token at the center of the protocol’s next era of growth and provides the pathway for NEAR to become a foundational protocol in the global economy. 

Join Us at NEARCON 2026

NEARCON in San Francisco this coming February 23-24 will be the central gathering point for the biggest players across the Agentic Economy—developers, enterprises, AI researchers, and protocol builders—all converging to define and showcase what user-owned AI looks like at scale. Apply to attend today.