🔥 LATEST: Banks and regulators across Europe, the Middle East and Asia are testing quantum-resistant crypto wallets and onchain transfers using a NEAR testnet.
https://t.co/eSNAKb2fEr
How Does NEAR Let You Pay for AI With Staked Tokens?
On July 30, NEAR (@NEARProtocol) introduced a new way to pay for AI inference and always-on agents.
Instead of paying for an AI subscription with a credit card, users can stake $NEAR and receive monthly compute credits.
The important part?
The NEAR tokens are not spent.
They remain staked until the user decides to unstake them, at which point the tokens return to the user's wallet.
Here’s how the system works:
(1) Stake $NEAR
Users lock NEAR tokens into the system.
The amount staked determines how many compute credits they receive for NEAR AI services.
It works more like a refundable deposit than a traditional subscription.
(2) Use the credits for AI
Those credits can be used across all 43 models currently available through NEAR AI.
That includes models from major AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Users can therefore access AI computation without maintaining a traditional credit card subscription.
(3) Adjust the stake when needed
The system is designed to move with usage.
Users can increase their stake when they need more computing capacity or reduce it when their requirements fall.
They can also lock additional NEAR to purchase one-off credits for short-term projects.
(4) Unstake and recover the tokens
When users no longer need the service, they can cancel the arrangement and unstake their NEAR.
The tokens are returned rather than being consumed as payment.
The capital backs access to computing instead of simply being transferred to a service provider.
So why is NEAR doing this?
The bigger idea goes beyond AI subscriptions.
NEAR has been exploring what happens when software agents become economic participants.
AI agents may eventually need to pay for computing, data, storage and other services without relying on human-operated bank accounts or credit cards.
NEAR's argument is that the token securing the network could also become part of that machine economy.
In this model, NEAR is not simply a token used for staking.
It can also act as a claim on the network's available computational resources.
There is also a tokenomics angle...
When users stake NEAR to back an active AI subscription, those tokens are temporarily removed from circulating supply.
A single subscription would have little impact.
But if AI inference and autonomous agents generate sustained demand, more NEAR could remain locked to support that activity.
That creates a link between actual network usage and the amount of NEAR temporarily taken out of circulation.
The important distinction is that this demand would come from usage rather than speculation.
More AI activity could therefore mean more NEAR being locked at any given time.
The real test will be whether developers and AI agents actually create enough demand to make this model economically meaningful.
Most "AI tokens" don't get you any AI. They get you emissions and a narrative. NEAR just became the exception.
Plainly: you stake NEAR and it turns into AI you actually use. Confidential inference and hosted agents running Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models. You keep the NEAR and unstake whenever you want.
Compare that to TAO, the token everyone holds up as the AI trade. You stake TAO to earn emissions, and what comes back is more TAO. It's yield farming with an AI network bolted on. Staking it doesn't get you a single inference call.
That's the whole difference, and it's not subtle. One token pays you in more of itself. The other pays for real compute and gives your capital back. For anyone building a product or running research, only one of those is worth anything.
NEAR pays for using AI. TAO pays you for holding TAO. Only one runs your workload.
A big part of what we do at SVRN is finding new ways to commercialize the NEAR product set. This collaboration with @Oracle is a great example, where we piloted an integration of @near_intents with their point of sale system Simphony.
MAINNET UPGRADE
Quantum-safe signing is now live on NEAR mainnet.
This makes NEAR one of the first blockchains with a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme in production.
The upgrade also launches dynamic resharding, so NEAR Protocol can scale itself automatically 🧵