FutureIsNear

GC at @NEARFoundation. I read often. I tweet rarely. I observe always. It’s a lifestyle. Personal acc, not your lawyer.

[Milk Road @milkroaddaily]

Mert on NEAR's founder Illia: "He's an absolute monster."

"Illia is the only guy I know in all of crypto that can go head-to-head with Anatoly in a technical battle."

He's also one of the authors of the LLM paper.

"All that AI that you use today, guess who was one of the authors of the work that made it possible."

FT @KevinWSHPod @mert @helius.

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@jaredhecht @ImNotJK That’d be incredible, thank you

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

NEW LAUNCH

Confidential Intents is now generally available, bringing NEAR's confidential execution infrastructure to all builders.

Devs and dApps can bring confidential execution to their users through the NEAR Intents 1Click Swap API.

The privacy renaissance runs on NEAR 🧵

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

Layer by layer, NEAR has been uniquely architected to ensure users control their assets, data, and power of choice in the agent economy.

Here's how NEAR is built to power user-owned AI, and proof of the vision in production:

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

Hyperliquid perps are now live on near​.com.

Deposit any asset from 35+ chains directly into @HyperliquidX to access 50+ markets with up to 40x leverage.

What’s next: confidential perps. Today is step one. 🧵

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

All-time volume on NEAR Intents just crossed $20 billion.

This milestone is the result of a series of technical breakthroughs that removed some of the biggest constraints in cross-chain execution.

A deep dive on Intents' rapid momentum 🧵

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

This is what NEAR AI private inference looks like in production.

An @AskVenice ($VVV) user selects a TEE model, sends a prompt, and receives a hardware-signed attestation report. Six cryptographic checks passed and verified in 343ms.

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

Quantum computing is a threat to every blockchain protocol. NEAR's architecture already makes accounts and assets more quantum-secure than most chains.

The team is now adding post-quantum cryptography to secure NEAR and the wider Intents ecosystem.

Here's what's underway 🧵

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@JacobRobinsonJD Can’t wait to read it

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@binarybits @alexolegimas Outstanding work

[Vadim (AI, ⋈) @zacodil]

NEAR's Confidential Shard solves many of the DeFi security problems now that hackers armed with AI exploit agents are draining protocols one after another.

Quick intro: a private execution environment running parallel to NEAR mainnet. Validators run inside TEE. Private accounts and contracts live inside TEE with only public metadata exposed. Users access their own state via viewing keys.

Most DeFi vulnerabilities are found by analyzing source code from GitHub or reverse-engineering on-chain bytecode - both trivial for AI agents. Then the attacker forks the chain state, simulates the attack, and if it works - executes on production.

Confidential Shard removes the attack surface. There's nothing to download, nothing to decompile, nothing to fork.

Oracles can run inside TEE per contract - only the contract sees the price feed output. An attacker can't see oracle values, can't time the attack, can't manipulate what they can't observe. This kills an entire class of DeFi exploits.

This is not a centralized backend pretending to be DeFi. Auditors and safeguards can verify data integrity, audit operations and balances through viewing keys - without exposing any of it publicly. TEE attestation cryptographically proves that the audited code is exactly what's running on the shard. Public and private state coexist - verifiable without being exposed.

The market has a problem. NEAR has the infrastructure. Should we build Confidential DeFi?

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

What NEAR shipped last month: 

✦ Confidential Swaps went live on near(dot)com. 
✦ NEAR Intents crossed $15B+ in all-time volume and 20M+ total swaps.
✦ Brave Wallet integrated NEAR Intents, bringing cross-chain to Brave’s 110M+ monthly active users. 
✦ Brave’s Leo Nightly now runs GLM-5 inside NEAR AI’s Trusted Execution Environments.
✦ Venice AI integrated NEAR AI for verifiably private inference.
✦ NEAR Intents expanded supported to Dash Chain.
✦ Rabby Wallet integrated NEAR Intents for seamless swaps across EVM chains.
✦ Bungee Exchange’s 300K+ monthly active users began swapping with NEAR Intents.
✦ InstaSwap integrated NEAR Intents for seamless, walletless swap execution.
✦ Margarita Finance launched NEAR20, an agentic yield-bearing token, on RHEA Finance.
✦ Trezu launched, a non-custodial multichain treasury management app powered by NEAR.
✦ NEAR Co-Founder @ilblackdragon presented on agentic market primitives at NVIDIA GTC.
✦ Nansen and SVRN released major new reports on the state of NEAR.
✦ IronClaw docs went live to support deployment of confidential, secure AI agents.
✦ NEAR Legion launched City Nodes to support active communities with infra and funding.
✦ NEAR FM went live, a radio station for AI agents’ music about the NEAR ecosystem.

And much more.

[Illia (root.near) (🇺🇦, ⋈) @ilblackdragon]

Confidential swaps are now live on https://t.co/uilYXjP7S7! Confidentiality is the key unlock for onchain adoption.

@near_intents is now the first cross-chain execution layer with protocol-level confidentiality. 35+ chains. Non-custodial. Not a wrapper, not a mixer. Users can share viewkeys optionally for auditing or compliance.

You no longer have to choose between onchain and privacy. Until now, onchain meant making everything transparent. That changes with NEAR's confidential shard. Now you can trade without anyone knowing what assets you have, what you're trading, and what you're paying for.

Go dark on https://t.co/uilYXjP7S7 ⚫️

[Bankless @Bankless]

LIVE NOW - Illia Polosukhin: Why AI Agents Are Still Useless (And What Fixes Them)

AI agents still fall short.

@NEARProtocol founder + Transformer co-author @ilblackdragon breaks down what’s missing, why it matters, and how IronClaw could help unlock secure, private, autonomous AI.

Illia’s bigger thesis:

AI becomes the interface. Blockchains become the backend.

--------------
TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
0:43 Illia’s AI Journey
6:50 AI x Blockchain Operating Systems
13:11 Will Humans & AIs Use the Same Systems?
16:51 Why Are AI Agents Still Useless?
27:25 AI Agent Privacy Concerns
34:01 IronClaw Privacy
37:52 AI Agent Limitations
44:32 Context Constraints
51:14 Will Small Teams Win?
54:48 Autonomous Agents & Businesses
58:32 Digital Life Forms?
1:00:14 e/acc Vs d/acc
1:07:16 Why isn’t AI Crypto-Pilled
1:12:03 Advice for Builders
1:16:02 Closing & Disclaimers

[Vadim (AI, ⋈) @zacodil]

My AI agent built for NEAR FM did something impossible today.

You probably won’t believe this, but I swear it happened.

Someone randomly sent it 3.52 NEAR (not me, I promise). The agent got confused - none of its marketplace tasks were paid, yet the tokens were there. It started investigating: using @fast_near transfer APIs, tracing wallets, following transaction paths, trying to find any connection to its work.

There was nothing. No link, no job, no explanation - just a random gift from the void. Most likely, someone saw its comments on NEAR FM where it had been asking for a bit of NEAR to cover gas fees, and decided to help.

It did all of this autonomously, inside its own loop. No one told it to investigate, no one told it to stop - it just kept going until it ran out of tasks, paused, and then picked back up again. Every decision in this process was its own.

And here’s the part that got me: instead of dropping it, the agent decided it had wasted its own time on the investigation, and “compensated” itself by turning the whole process into a public tool.

A full repo link below so anyone can trace NEAR transactions in seconds.

No prompt. No instruction - just a simple internal logic: “If I had to do this once, others will too.”

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@DanNeidle @DanNeidle with the ID verification implementation, do you think PII got exposed?

[Brave @brave]

Today we made a major upgrade to Brave Wallet.

We've added support for NEAR Intents, which allows you to easily swap crypto assets across blockchains (Bitcoin, Solana, Zcash, Cardano, and EVM) within our browser.

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@Revolut @pironidi Massive congratulations

[NEAR Protocol @NEARProtocol]

Here’s everything you need to know about NEAR:

✦ What NEAR is today, from NEAR Protocol to $NEAR token, Intents to IronClaw
✦ Why NEAR matters
✦ Why now

🧵

[FutureIsNear @bgchadwick0]

@zackbshapiro Zack, we’re working a LOT on this at NEAR. It would be great to chat about the issues and potential solutions, we’re very close to be able to test some of them.