NEAR Protocol

In 2018 Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov co-founded NEAR Protocol, originally spun out of an AI startup called Near.ai.

In July 2019 NEAR closed a $12.1M round led by Metastable Capital and Accomplice to fund its sharding research.

NEAR's mainnet went live in April 2020 in a restricted proof-of-stake mode, and in May it raised another $21.6M led by a16z.

By 2021 NEAR surpassed one million accounts and launched Rainbow Bridge and Aurora's EVM compatibility layer.

In 2022 NEAR raised $350M led by Tiger Global at a valuation above $20B, though FTX Ventures exposure left it hit by the FTX collapse.

In 2023 NEAR coined and practiced Chain Abstraction, launching the Blockchain Operating System to remove cross-chain friction.

In 2024 NEAR deployed Chain Signatures to mainnet and launched NEAR Intents and the NEAR AI lab, adopting a blockchain-for-AI strategy.

In 2025 NEAR hit 1 million TPS in a public benchmark and cut block time to 600 ms with 1.2 s finality.

In 2025 NEAR Intents surpassed $7B in cross-chain volume with peak monthly active users of 46 million, while inflation was halved to 2.5%.

In 2026 NEAR focused on the agent economy, rolling out Confidential Intents and IronClaw for secure AI-agent settlement.

NEAR surged roughly 175% during September 2026: on September 17 it launched confidential perpetual futures with default privacy (on the Hyperliquid engine), confidential TVL crossed $70 million and triggered the NEAR@3.33 incentive airdrop; on July 30 it launched "Staking for NEAR AI", where staking NEAR converts into AI inference credits, with over 500,000 NEAR already staked.

A September 30 governance-forum proposal would cut annual inflation from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months, avoiding about 66 million NEAR of issuance, while staking yield may fall from 5.4% to 3.5%, with a longer-term path to fixed supply. On October 1, NEAR Intents was exploited for $3.8 million via an Omni bridge bug; NEAR fell about 7.5% that day, and the attacker later returned the funds in full.

The fee switch went live at the end of February 2026, routing a share of Intents fees into open-market NEAR buybacks; the same month it launched the NEAR AI agent market and held NEARCON in San Francisco on February 23–24. Confidential Intents arrived in May, using privacy shards and TEE bridges to hide sender, amount and route, with confidential assets above $30 million.

Release 2.13 in June introduced dynamic resharding, which splits shards automatically under load without governance votes; the team says dynamic resharding and post-quantum signatures have reached testnet, making it the first major L1 with one-click post-quantum key rotation. By July Intents had passed $22 billion of cumulative volume and $37 million of fees, with about $3 million of monthly buybacks; the 30-day fee capture rate reached 30.5% against an 11.5% lifetime average. Daily active addresses nonetheless fell sharply from nearly three million early in the year, leaving real usage behind the narrative.

NEAR Protocol's Future strategy and roadmap: NEAR compresses a decade of sharding work into one revenue chain. After the fee switch, a share of every dollar through Intents is taken as protocol revenue and used to buy back NEAR, lifting the capture rate from an 11.5% lifetime average to 30.5% over the trailing 30 days on more than USD 19 billion of cumulative flow, letting it discuss deflation through revenue rather than narrative. Distribution runs through two owned surfaces: near.com keeps 100% of its fees, and one account across 35 chains hides bridges and gas. On the enterprise side, IronClaw and the confidential GPU marketplace target Bermuda's government, Abound's USD 135 billion remittance market and inference demand from Brave and Venice. It competes with cloud providers for confidential compute budgets, at the cost of operational complexity.

NEAR Protocol was founded in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Illia grew up in Ukraine, studied applied mathematics at Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute and worked on search and machine learning at Google; he is one of the authors of the 2017 Transformer paper Attention Is All You Need. Alex grew up in Russia, studied computer science at MIPT and worked on databases and compilers at Microsoft Research Asia and MemSQL. The two met through open source and first worked together on an AI crowdsourcing effort.

Illia is now CEO of the NEAR Foundation, while Alex works as co-founder on sharding and virtual machine research. Chris Donovan is COO and general counsel, previously handling compliance at a payments company; Diogo Monica chairs the foundation council and co-founded Anchorage Digital.

NEAR Protocol recently welcomed Benjamin Kurrek as a Senior Software Engineer in June 2026. He brings deep Web3 experience, having co-founded Keypom (acquired by Infinex) and previously worked at NEAR-affiliated Pagoda. His addition signals a continued focus on strengthening core protocol engineering and developer tooling.

No departures were recorded during this period.