Counting the starfish

[Flood @ThinkingUSD]

Had some recently ask what they should read to become a better investor.

Highly recommend reading BRK-A shareholder letters +/- 1 year around a significant crash.

https://t.co/z8Gafpziku

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@tumsize @dankrad The lower hanging fruit is the early wallets
No law enforcement will get involved vs banks etc

[Niyetsel @niyetsel]

Looking someone dead in the eyes is praised as the ultimate sign of respect.

We are told to hold a steady gaze to prove we are deeply engaged.
We force our pupils to lock onto individuals who are drowning in their own erratic chaos.
We stare directly into the active storm of a stranger carrying unspoken grief, bitter tension, or a frantic mental state.

The pupil is an unshielded gateway.
It operates as a frictionless vacuum for ambient frequency.

When you hold a hard visual anchor with a heavily burdened person, a structural tether instantly snaps into place between you.
You build a direct conduit for their heavy static to pour straight into your clear space.

You walk away from a five-minute interaction feeling incredibly hollow and weighed down.
A sudden, dull pressure sits right behind your forehead.
You just allowed a massive leak in your defensive perimeter simply to appear polite.
This is an active, measurable siphoning of your vital reserves.

Those who deeply understand subtle architecture handle crowded spaces entirely differently.
They observe the room but keep their visual focus soft, diffused, and slightly lowered.

When forced to interact in a heavy environment, they look right at the bridge of the nose instead of the dark center of the eye.
To the person speaking, the gesture looks identical to unwavering attention.
But internally, the intake valve remains firmly shut.

Stop handing over your core reserves just to follow basic etiquette.
Keep your visual gates closed and your personal field entirely intact.

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@TheYemiKing Israel

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@czbinanceprd $near

[Wiki Leaks 1.0 @WikiLeaksQ]

Mercury, Venus and Saturn above the pyramids of Giza, Egypt

This happens once every 2373 years.

Coincidence?

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@waxnear

[𝗘𝗟 @MasterNumber]

The whole point of this circus is to ascend. Earth gave you trauma, lust, ego, money, fear, exes, taxes and algorithms, and you still think the mission is to get comfortable? Fam, how many side quests do you need before you clock the main one?

Earth is basically spiritual GTA. Temptation everywhere, random boss fights, people trying to rob your energy, and half the population still thinks the mission is get a mortgage and die politely.

The game is simple. Master yourself, stop getting baited by every impulse, learn what the fuck you are, then ascend. People turned the tutorial into a 70-year side quest.

Imagine reincarnating 12 times just to keep falling for lust, ego, money and people’s opinions. Brother, complete the fucking level.

You got dropped into a body with desires, fear, trauma, hormones, ego and free will, then surrounded by distractions 24/7. And people still can’t work out there might be a test going on. Comedy.

Life keeps sending the same lesson wearing different faces and people keep calling it bad luck. Fam, at some point you’ve gotta pass the fucking exam.

The wildest part is people think the goal is comfort. Nothing about this place looks designed for comfort. It looks like a spiritual obstacle course

You came here naked, leave with nothing, and somehow people think the whole point was collecting shit in between. Mad

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@CastilloTrading 4 green months then?

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@MINopoly_ @TrustlessTooth Institutions will want to get a lower entry
They will buy lower …

[SalsaTekila @SalsaTekila]

Listen and listen well. Listen again. Listen.

You have no listened enough.

Listen again.

Then upload it to voice memos with claude, and loop it.

Keep listening.

[MB.hl @MBxxvv]

@binance @HyperliquidX Hyperliquid

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@charlie_bst @_tm3k Please elaborate
Thank you

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@stas_paradigma @Cointelegraph Wallet attribution

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@RoyalKane_X Legendary
Great to have you back

[MSB Intel @MSBIntel]

BREAKING: NEAR launches confidential perpetual futures trading powered by Hyperliquid.

Allowing users to open positions without publicly linking trades to their accounts.

[Counting the starfish @Sol01374099]

@KillaXBT Thanks mate

[The Great Mattsby @GreatMattsby]

$NEAR just broke out of the weekly Ichimokud cloud for the first time in almost 2 years.

$ZEC already did that back in 2024

$NEAR is going to have its $ZEC moment

[Chain INK @0xchainink]

$NEAR : Review 📜

What if the person who co-wrote the paper that made ChatGPT possible spent the following decade building the blockchain that AI agents would need?

Meet NEAR Protocol, founded by a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the transformer paper underpinning every major language model in use today. It has spent years building chain abstraction, where one account signs across 25 blockchains and users state what they want rather than how to do it, and has now pointed that infrastructure at autonomous agents.

Let's explore the one L1 whose AI claim has a citation behind it. 👇

⚪ NEAR at a Glance

Marketplace Insight: NEAR competes in AI-crypto with a credential no rival can replicate, since its founder co-authored the transformer paper. What changed in 2026 is that the thesis stopped being the only asset. Intents is production infrastructure at $27 billion cumulative volume with Stripe's agent payment rails routing through it, quantum-safe signing is live on mainnet while banks and regulators pilot post-quantum wallets on a NEAR testnet, and over half a million NEAR is staked purely to power confidential AI inference.

The clean contrast is that NEAR spent years accused of shipping narratives faster than usage. The usage has now arrived, and the token has spent most of the period range-bound regardless.

⚪ Mission

NEAR exists to make blockchains invisible. The founding observation was that users do not care which chain they are on, they care about achieving an outcome, and that every gas token, bridge, and seed phrase between them and that outcome is friction that keeps the technology niche. Chain abstraction is the answer: one account, one signature, any chain underneath.

The AI extension follows naturally, since a human tolerates a clunky bridge but an autonomous agent running hundreds of daily microtransactions across protocols simply breaks at the first chain boundary.

🔵 A Brief History

NEAR began as an AI company. In 2017, Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR ai to teach machines to code, a project that required paying contributors globally and led them into crypto as users rather than believers. Polosukhin had been a machine learning researcher at Google and co-authored "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that introduced the transformer architecture.

Skidanov had been engineer number one and director of engineering at Microsoft's SingleStore and contributed to OpenAI. Finding Ethereum unusable for their purposes, they pivoted in 2018 to building a blockchain from scratch, launching mainnet in April 2020.

The years since have been a sequence of deliberate architectural bets. Nightshade sharding delivered parallel processing, Nightshade 2.0 cut block times to 600 milliseconds in 2025, and by late 2025 the network shipped stateless validation, expanded from 6 to 9 mainnet shards, and demonstrated a publicly verifiable 1 million TPS benchmark. Governance halved inflation from 5% to 2.5% in October 2025.

The strategic shift came in 2024, when Chain Signatures shipped to mainnet allowing smart contracts to sign transactions on any blockchain, followed by NEAR Intents in November. 2026 delivered the payoff in usage rather than narrative. Cumulative Intents volume crossed $6 billion by April and $27 billion by September across more than 30 million swaps, with Brave adding native integration for over 70 million users. Version 2.13 shipped in July with NIST-standard ML-DSA quantum-safe signing and dynamic resharding on mainnet, alongside IronClaw for always-on agents.

August was a dense execution month: Confidential Intents crossed $50 million in TVL with 57% of near com activity running privately, Confidential Earn launched, NEAR AI Cloud integrated Intel Trust Authority, Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol began routing agent payments through Intents, and banks and regulators joined a cross-regional post-quantum wallet pilot on a NEAR testnet.

Polosukhin proposed a Sovereign Fund seeded with 30 million NEAR, and Bitwise amended its spot NEAR ETF filing under the ticker NRR.

🔵 Ecosystem Narrative

The organizing idea is that the chain should disappear, and every component removes another thing the user has to know.

➛ Chain Signatures. Multi-party computation lets a single NEAR account
sign transactions on over 25 blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum, so one keypair controls assets everywhere without bridges.

➛ NEAR Intents. Users and agents state desired outcomes rather than transactions, with solvers competing to execute across any chain, processing over $27 billion cumulatively across more than 30 million swaps.

➛ Confidential computing as default. Over $50 million in Confidential Intents TVL with 57% of near com activity running privately, powered by hardware-backed trusted execution environments and Intel Trust Authority, so holdings, trades, and yield are visible only to the user.

➛ Agent payment rails. Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol routes through NEAR Intents, and the x402 Agent Payments Skill lets an agent fund USDC on Base from over 30 chains, so settlement and funding no longer need to happen on the same chain.

➛ Quantum-safe infrastructure, live. NIST FIPS-204 ML-DSA signing is on mainnet as of v2.13, with a published roadmap toward Universal Account IDs and post-quantum consensus, and banks and regulators already piloting PQ wallets on a NEAR testnet.

➛ Distribution partnerships. Brave Browser's native integration reaches over 70 million users, with Intents routes live across Ledger, Solflare, Stargate, Infinex, and Rhea.

⚪ Token Utilities

$NEAR secures the network and captures value from activity across chains.

➛ Gas and storage: pays for transactions and contract execution, with accounts locking NEAR for storage, so agent proliferation would remove supply from circulation.

➛ Confidential inference staking: over 500,000 NEAR is staked to power confidential AI compute on NEAR AI Cloud, direct token demand generated by AI usage rather than speculation.

➛ Staking and security: validators and delegators stake to secure the sharded proof-of-stake network.

➛ Governance: holders vote through House of Stake on protocol decisions including the inflation halving and the Sovereign Fund proposal.

⚪ Key Features

➛ Chain Signatures enabling one account to sign across 25+ blockchains.

➛ Intents processing over $27B in cumulative cross-chain volume.

➛ Confidential computing as the default on near com, with $50M+ in private TVL.

➛ NIST-standard quantum-safe signing live on mainnet with institutional pilots running.

➛ Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol routing agent payments through NEAR.

➛ A verified 1 million TPS benchmark with dynamic resharding.

🔵 Meet the Team

NEAR's founding team is its most differentiated asset, pairing genuine frontier AI research with distributed systems engineering at scale, supported by an operating bench drawn from major technology companies.

▶️ Core Members:

➛ Illia Polosukhin [ @ilblackdragon ] - Co-Founder | A former machine learning researcher at Google and co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture powering essentially every modern large language model. No other Layer 1 founder holds peer-reviewed AI credentials at that level. He authored the Sovereign Fund proposal and has publicly rejected a simple token burn in favour of pursuing a fixed supply model.

➛ Alexander Skidanov - Co-Founder | Engineer number one and later director of engineering at Microsoft's SingleStore, and a contributor to OpenAI. He brought the distributed systems expertise behind Nightshade sharding, the architecture that made NEAR's throughput claims possible.

➛ Eric Winer - CTO and Managing Director | Leads engineering across the protocol, carrying the work behind Nightshade sharding, stateless validation, dynamic resharding, and the quantum-safe signing that shipped in v2.13.

➛ George Xian Zeng - Chief Product Officer | Owns product direction across the stack, including near com's shift to confidential-by-default, Confidential Earn, and the Intents surfaces that reach users through Brave, Ledger, and Solflare.

➛ Alex Shevchenko - Product Manager | Drives product execution across the chain abstraction and Intents work that has become NEAR's strongest proof point.

➛ Nicci Arsenault - Chief People Officer | Leads organizational growth across the team, supporting an operation spanning protocol engineering, AI research, and ecosystem development.

🔵 Ratings

➛ Use Case: ★★★★★ (5/5). NEAR is category-defining infrastructure with verifiable traction at a scale almost no peer matches. Intents has processed over $27 billion across more than 30 million swaps with 700,000 unique users in a single month, Chain Signatures lets one account sign across 25-plus blockchains, and the network reached 50 million monthly active users. Distribution runs through Brave's 70 million users, Ledger, and Solflare. Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol routes agent payments through it. Confidential computing runs as the default on near com with over $50 million in private TVL, quantum-safe signing is live on mainnet with banks and regulators piloting it, and 500,000 NEAR is staked purely to power confidential AI inference. Chain abstraction is the most architecturally complete implementation in the market, and the AI thesis is now backed by usage rather than positioning.

➛ Tokenomics: ★★★★ (4/5). The supply picture is among the cleanest of any major L1. Circulating supply is effectively 100% of total, so there is no unlock overhang or vesting cliff, inflation was halved from 5% to 2.5% by governance, and transaction fees are partially burned. Real demand sinks are operating: over 500,000 NEAR staked for confidential inference ties lockup directly to AI compute usage, storage requirements mean agent proliferation removes further supply, stablecoin supply on the network nearly doubled in a week to around $128 million, and the Intents fee switch routes genuine revenue into buybacks. The 1-point deduction is that there is still no hard supply cap, the network remains modestly inflationary, the buyback's value is largely shared with integration partners rather than holders, and the Sovereign Fund path toward fixed supply is an open discussion with no binding vote scheduled.

➛ Audits: ★★★★⯪ (4.5/5). NEAR's security posture is among the strongest of any Layer 1, and it is forward-looking rather than merely clean. The network has run since April 2020 through major architectural changes including Nightshade sharding, stateless validation, and dynamic resharding without a protocol-level exploit. More significantly, it shipped NIST FIPS-204 ML-DSA quantum-safe signing to mainnet ahead of essentially every competitor, published a full post-quantum roadmap extending to consensus-level protection, and has banks and regulators actively piloting post-quantum wallets and transfers on a NEAR testnet using MPC built on ML-DSA-65. Institutional participation of that kind implies diligence well beyond a standard audit. The 0.5-point deduction is that the chain abstraction architecture inherits the security assumptions of every network it routes through, as demonstrated in April 2026 when a Litecoin zero-day chain reorganization produced roughly $600K in exposure through Intents.

➛ Community: ★★★★⯪ (4.5/5). NEAR has genuine scale and one of the more functional governance cultures in crypto, with 50 million monthly active users, over 800 funded projects, more than $45 million distributed in ecosystem grants, and House of Stake voting through consequential economic decisions including the inflation halving, HSP-028 on namespace governance, and the open Sovereign Fund discussion. The Sovereign Fund drew a notably positive response specifically for its transparency relative to how the Foundation previously handled treasury funds. Developer momentum is visible in the Intents integration pipeline spanning Solflare, Stargate, Infinex, Rhea, and Bloom. The 0.5-point deduction is that the token has underperformed the fundamentals for an extended stretch, trading range-bound through August despite record usage, which tests holder patience.

🔵 Conclusion

NEAR is one of the few projects where the AI positioning is not a marketing decision. Its co-founder wrote the paper that made modern language models possible, and the infrastructure built since is designed precisely for the constraint autonomous agents face. In 2026 that stopped being a thesis and became throughput: $27 billion in cumulative Intents volume across 30 million swaps, Stripe's agent payment rails routing through it, over half a million NEAR staked to power confidential inference, and quantum-safe signing live on mainnet while banks pilot it on a testnet.

The risks are worth naming. The network remains inflationary with no hard cap, and the Sovereign Fund path toward fixed supply is a discussion rather than a decision. The Intents buyback shares most of its value with integration partners. The abstraction layer inherits the security of every chain it touches, as the April Litecoin incident showed. And NEAR has changed its headline narrative repeatedly across its history, which makes any new framing worth weighing against the track record.

But the bull case has stopped requiring belief. NEAR is not asking anyone to imagine that agents will need chain-abstracted, confidential, quantum-safe infrastructure. It built that, put it in front of 70 million Brave users, processed $27 billion through it, got Stripe to route agent payments across it, and staffed the thesis with the person who co-invented the architecture the AI industry runs on. NEAR spent a decade building for a moment that had not arrived. The moment is arriving, and for once the infrastructure was already there.

[//Bitcoin 𝕵ack 🐐 @bitcoinjack]

$NEAR will gain insane momentum once people figure out it's the best wallet out there to run your hot assets through