Key Takeaways
NEAR Protocol is a highly scalable Layer 1 blockchain powered by Nightshade 2.0 sharding, enabling 8 active shards and 600ms block time.
Chain Abstraction allows users, developers, and AI agents to move assets and interact across multiple blockchains using a single NEAR account.
NEAR Intents simplify complex blockchain actions by letting users and agents express what they want to do, while solvers handle how it gets done.
NEAR is building an open agentic internet, giving AI agents real wallets, verifiable actions, private data handling, and multichain access.
The NEAR token (NEAR) is used for transaction fees, storage, staking rewards, and ecosystem governance.
Introduction
NEAR is a blockchain for AI. It’s built from the ground up to support applications, agents, and users at a global scale. Sharding gives NEAR the speed and capacity to handle massive demand. Chain Abstraction makes it simple for users and AI agents to interact across multiple blockchains with one account. Privacy and verifiability are built into the core, enabling agents to own assets, make decisions, and act independently.
Each part of NEAR’s design—scalability, multichain access, private AI—works together to power an open, user-owned internet where AI isn’t just an add-on. It’s a first-class participant.
Whether you're building consumer apps, finance platforms, or autonomous agents, NEAR provides the infrastructure to run them fast, securely, and across chains.
Sharding
NEAR uses a sharding design called Nightshade 2.0 to scale its infrastructure. Sharding lets NEAR split the network into multiple parallel shards—each processing transactions independently. This means the network’s capacity grows with demand.
As of 2025, NEAR runs 8 active shards, and thanks to recent upgrades, it achieves transaction finality in around 600 milliseconds—one of the fastest speeds in Web3.
NEAR also introduced stateless validation, allowing validators to process transactions without storing the full state of a shard. This reduces hardware requirements and improves decentralization.
Sharding is what enables NEAR to support high-throughput applications like AI agents, multichain protocols, and consumer apps—at internet scale. It also powers cross-chain infrastructure like OmniBridge, which relies on NEAR’s speed and scalability to move assets securely between major networks.
Chain Abstraction and NEAR Intents
NEAR is built to remove the complexity of using blockchain. Two of its core innovations—Chain Abstraction and NEAR Intents—make Web3 feel invisible to users while unlocking powerful functionality for developers and AI agents.
Chain Abstraction
Chain Abstraction lets users and developers interact with multiple blockchains—Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Zcash, and more—using a single NEAR account. There’s no need to switch wallets, manage gas tokens across chains, or even know what network you’re on. This creates a seamless experience for both Web2 and Web3 applications.
Under the hood, Chain Abstraction is powered by Chain Signatures, a multichain cryptographic system that allows NEAR accounts to sign and send transactions to any supported blockchain.
NEAR Intents
NEAR Intents give users and agents the ability to express what they want to do—like swap tokens or buy an item—without having to manually execute how it gets done. Off-chain solvers then compete to fulfill these intents in the most efficient way, abstracting away the complexity of DeFi and cross-chain execution.
This system unlocks a new class of applications where AI agents, users, and services can coordinate transactions and actions across chains without needing deep blockchain knowledge.
Together, Chain Abstraction and NEAR Intents are shaping a world where using crypto feels as simple as using the internet.
NEAR AI
NEAR is not just scaling transactions—it’s building the infrastructure for an agentic internet, where AI agents can own assets, make decisions, and act autonomously across blockchains.
On NEAR, AI agents aren’t just tools for answering prompts—they can hold wallets, sign transactions, pay for services, and operate like real users. This is possible because NEAR’s architecture is designed for verifiable, private, and user-owned AI.
Key technologies that power NEAR AI include:
Chain Signatures: Allowing AI agents to interact with any blockchain from their NEAR account.
Stateless Validation and Fast Finality.
Privacy Technologies: Protecting user data while allowing agents to perform actions on behalf of users.
Open Agent Marketplace: A future ecosystem where developers can build, deploy, and monetize AI agents on-chain.
By giving AI agents real autonomy with security and privacy built-in, NEAR is creating the foundation for the next wave of intelligent decentralized applications.
Closing Thoughts
The future of the internet will be driven by agents, apps, and users operating across many blockchains, not locked into single ecosystems. Building for this future requires scalability, privacy, and user ownership at the foundation.
NEAR Protocol delivers all three: sharding that scales, Chain Abstraction that unifies blockchains, and infrastructure for verifiable AI agents. As decentralized apps and intelligent agents become widespread, NEAR offers developers and users the tools to build, deploy, and thrive in the next generation of the internet.
Further Reading
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