NEAR Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for usability, scalability, and developer accessibility. Founded by former Google and Microsoft engineers and launched in 2020, NEAR uses a unique scaling technique called Nightshade sharding — splitting the network into multiple parallel “shards” that process transactions simultaneously, allowing throughput to grow linearly with the number of shards. NEAR targets a future of thousands of TPS while maintaining decentralisation, and its human-readable account names (e.g. “yourname.near” instead of a 42-character hex address) make it one of the most user-friendly blockchains.
NEAR has emerged as a key platform for AI-native applications and autonomous agent infrastructure. The NEAR Foundation has explicitly positioned the network as the transaction layer for “agentic commerce” — where AI agents autonomously pay, negotiate, and settle on behalf of users. The NEAR AI initiative focuses on building the infrastructure for AI agents that can interact with blockchains, smart contracts, and real-world services. Beyond AI, NEAR has a strong DeFi ecosystem, a thriving gaming sector, and the Aurora EVM-compatible environment that allows Ethereum dApps to run on NEAR. The NEAR token is used for fees, staking, and governance.
NEAR is frequently highlighted as one of the top AI-aligned blockchain projects — making it particularly relevant in the 2025–2026 AI crypto narrative cycle.
Example: An AI agent built on NEAR autonomously browses DeFi protocols, identifies the best yield opportunity for a user’s USDC, and executes the deposit — paying fees in NEAR and settling the transaction in under 2 seconds, all without human intervention.
Learn more: NEAR Protocol — Learn
