NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is a sharded blockchain platform that presents itself as infrastructure for artificial intelligence and decentralized applications. The project positions the network as a settlement layer for software agents that transact and operate across Web2 and Web3. Its design combines user-owned AI, intents with chain abstraction, and a sharded architecture.

NEAR Intents is the component that lets a user state a goal and have it carried out across chains, without handling bridges or gas manually. The project says it connects liquidity across more than 35 chains and over 125 assets from a single account. It also offers a confidential mode that runs execution inside a private shard.

NEAR AI covers private inference and an agent harness called IronClaw, which isolates tools and credentials inside hardware-enforced trusted execution environments. The network was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, who is credited with introducing the Transformer architecture. The project states that mainnet has stayed online for over five years, with 600 ms blocks, 1.2 second finality and a stated capacity of 1 million transactions per second.