Author: Jae, PANews
Flowing narrative, ironclad Near. From high-performance public chains, sharding scalability, to chain abstraction, Intents, and now the hottest AI Agent, Near has almost never been absent from any mainstream narrative in the past several rounds of the crypto cycle.
Backed by Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the classic AI Transformer paper, called "the one who understands AI best in the Web3 space," Near still delivered an unexpected report card during the bear market. Now, Near has become a cross-chain infrastructure giant that has processed over $20 billion in cross-chain transactions and generated over $34 million in fee revenue.
However, few people know that the birth of Near did not stem from grand blockchain ideals but rather from a somewhat awkward reality: the inability to pay cross-border salaries. Eight years ago, to solve the problem of paying global developers across borders, Illia Polosukhin co-founded an AI startup that was forced to pause its AI dream and turned to create a public chain.
Today, as the AI craze sweeps the globe, this public chain, born from AI and having previously made way for AI, has returned to the starting point of the story.
The salary issue unexpectedly gave birth to a public chain, now returning to the AI track
History is sometimes a marvelous cycle. Nine years ago, Illia Polosukhin had not yet become one of the most AI-labeled founders in the crypto industry.
Near was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the Transformer paper and former Google machine learning researcher, along with distributed systems expert Alexander Skidanov.
Initially, Near was an AI startup focused on "Program Synthesis," which is "teaching machines to write code" to achieve software development automation, with concepts similar to later OpenAI's CodeX, Anthropic's Claude Code, and Cursor.
To train algorithms and models, the team recruited computer science students worldwide to remotely write code snippets. However, how to pay developers scattered around the world became a monumental challenge for the project.
At that time, the cross-border payment system was far from mature as it is today, with mainstream payment tools such as PayPal and Wise severely constrained in Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, leading to various issues with delayed receipts and currency conversion losses. Interestingly, when the two founders tried to use early public chains for cross-border payments, they found that high Gas fees and low settlement efficiency made it impossible to distribute labor payments at a low cost in bulk.
For a resource-constrained AI startup, 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 AI models and instead build a high-scalability, low-cost, and user-friendly public chain themselves.
It was this passive transformation triggered by "not being able to pay salaries" that led to the birth of the "Near public chain" in 2018.
However, the early transformation path was not smooth. After departing from the AI track, Near shifted to developing a high-performance public chain focused on sharding technology to solve blockchain scalability issues.
With solid technical strength, the Near protocol raised over $500 million in cumulative funding during this period, but in the chaotic battleground of public chains, Near struggled to form a phenomenal benchmark application and attract developers for mass enrollment. Sparse ecological applications, stagnated user growth, and low market attention meant that even with a leading sharding architecture, Near’s focus was long diverted by other popular public chains, resulting in a period of silence where it was "praised but not adopted."
During the bull market from 2020 to 2021, Near rode the cross-chain wave, and the launch of Rainbow Bridge became a significant catalyst for the explosion of its ecosystem and skyrocketing token price.
Until the AI craze erupted, Near encountered a turning point in its fate. 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 share the stage for a discussion.
Huang praised the paper for "changing the world," emphasizing that the Transformer architecture is the foundation of all achievements in the AI industry, and its impact has reshaped the global landscape of technology, content, and finance. This highlight moment attracted the attention of the crypto market once again to Illia Polosukhin, as a co-creator, and Near, who had strayed from its AI dream, reaffirming their identity rooted in "AI bloodline."
With a renewed posture returning to the battlefield, Near's unique "technical core" has been further activated. Taking this opportunity, the protocol is transforming towards Near Intents and privacy transactions, laying a solid foundation under the trend of multi-chain intention and agent economy integration.
The intent transaction layer has significantly lowered the interaction threshold for AI Agents, allowing Agents deployed on confidential hardware TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) like Venice AI to autonomously, securely, and cost-effectively transfer funds across chains.
Near Intents as a new growth line, capturing $20 billion in transaction volume
Near Intents has redefined the interactive experience of cross-chain transactions. In a traditional multi-chain environment, users need to manually operate cross-chain bridges, prepare different Gas tokens for the source and target chains, and constantly guard against slippage and friction costs to perform a single cross-chain asset exchange.
Near has implemented a full-process abstraction with its intent mechanism, allowing users to simply express their transaction needs, such as “exchanging BTC on the source chain for ETH on the target chain,” without needing to解解cross-chain paths and Gas consumption. This is the interactive experience sought by ordinary users and even future AI Agents.
The execution of cross-chain transactions relies on the bidding mechanism of the off-chain solver network.
When a user submits an intent request, the solver network conducts bidding through the Solver Bus, automatically seeking and calculating the optimal execution route and pricing.
Once the user signs the quote, the intent will be submitted to the verifier smart contract on the Near chain for final settlement.
In the entire process, Gas fees will be deducted in the background, with users making payments unconsciously, effectively releasing the vitality of DeFi cross-chain transactions. The significant optimization of user experience has allowed Near to gain widespread integration with traffic entry points like Ledger.
However, the potential centralization of the solver network is also a significant risk. Since solvers require ample market-making liquidity and complex algorithmic optimization, transaction APIs like 1Click typically rely on trusted exchange agents and leading market makers. This may lead to oligopoly in the solver market, weakening the price advantages originally brought by the bidding mechanism.
DeFi Llama data shows that Near Intents has been deployed to 25 public chains, covering major settlement networks in the crypto market.
The protocol's TVL (Total Value Locked) exceeds $85 million, retaining $36.5 million in funds on the Near chain while establishing deep liquidity on Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, and other chains through the chain abstraction mechanism. The breadth of this cross-chain ecosystem is also key to Near Intents surpassing the $20 billion mark in cumulative transaction volume.
From a profitability perspective, since the launch of Near Intents, the protocol has generated over $33 million in fees. Notably, the past two quarters contributed more than 70% of the revenue. This indicates that as the multi-chain ecosystem continues to expand, the protocol's profitability has also shown an upward trend.
Gradually increasing fee revenue will establish a positive feedback mechanism at the economic level for NEAR. The vast majority of network costs will be burned, injecting deflationary momentum into NEAR tokens, further strengthening its value capture capability.
Privacy transactions absorb 40% of traffic, a growth engine or regulatory risk?
Currently, as on-chain activities increase, privacy needs are no longer marginalized in the crypto market, which has become a differentiating advantage for Near.
Since the first quarter of this year, upon the launch of "Confidential Intents" and "Confidential Swaps," their adoption rate has rapidly risen. In the past 30 days, the total trading volume on the Near chain was $209 million, with confidential swap transactions reaching an impressive $87 million, accounting for 41.63%. This data reflects not only product adoption but also the genuine existence of market demand.
Behind the business explosion, Near has tapped into 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 institutions or whales executing large trades to face severe sandwich attacks (MEV), significant slippage, and leaks of strategies.
The confidential intent feature introduces programmable privacy technology, allowing users to seamlessly switch to "private mode" on the front-end interface. In this mode: the amounts, directions, and positions of the trades remain completely hidden during execution and are only verifiably encoded and recorded on-chain at settlement.
The bots' traps become ineffective, and traders' business secrets are preserved. The confidential swap feature will open up relatively safe DeFi channels for institutional funds, reducing trading friction and fostering the integration of on-chain ecology with mainstream finance.
However, the other side of the coin cannot be ignored. The over 40% share of privacy transactions not only proves the genuine existence of demand but may also attract regulatory scrutiny. Global regulatory pressure on privacy protocols like Tornado Cash has never waned. The circulation of anonymous large funds more easily triggers regulatory enforcement. If regulators determine that the "confidential swap" model poses risks of aiding money laundering, Near may inevitably enter the regulatory spotlight and could become one of the biggest uncertainties it faces in the future.
Reflecting on the long journey of nine years, Near's growth script shows extremely dramatic directions. Despite experiencing competition among public chains, market cycles, and narrative shifts, it continues to adjust its development direction.
Today, chain abstraction, Intents, and privacy transactions have become new exploration focuses for Near, while the AI craze allows the market to re-examine the unique background of this public chain. However, whether these attempts will help Near establish a more solid ecological moat still requires more time to observe.
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