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Overview

The NEAR Protocol is a high-performance, Layer-1 blockchain platform designed to support decentralized applications, digital assets, and smart contracts with a focus on scalability, developer experience, and user-friendly blockchain interactions. Built using a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism with Nightshade sharding technology, NEAR enables fast and energy-efficient transaction processing while maintaining decentralization. With its innovative approach to blockchain infrastructure, NEAR has positioned itself as "the blockchain for AI," providing the foundation for user-owned, private, and verifiable AI applications.

Key Developments: Q3 2025

NEAR announces NEARCON 2026, a major conference focused on 'The Internet Wants to Think' theme, scheduled for February 23-24, 2026 in San Francisco. The event will explore user-owned AI, chain abstraction, and decentralized infrastructure with keynotes, live agent demos, and debates between industry leaders. The conference represents NEAR's commitment to open, decentralized AI development.
NEAR announces two major partnerships: integration with Aptos for seamless cross-chain liquidity through NEAR Intents, enabling users to swap Bitcoin, Ethereum and 20+ chains directly into APT and native USDT on Aptos without bridges. Additionally, NEAR partners with Shelby, a decentralized hot storage protocol co-developed by Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto, designed for sub-second reads and AI workloads to power the agentic economy.
NEAR publishes comprehensive overview of its AI ecosystem in 2025, covering Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning (DCML), the NEAR Agent Hub, fine-tuning and model training capabilities, data storage and labeling solutions, AI agents and agentic protocols including Shade Agents, and various AI assistants. The update highlights NEAR's position as the blockchain for AI with user-owned, private, and verifiable AI infrastructure.
NEAR partners with Privy to simplify blockchain onboarding by enabling users to create blockchain accounts using familiar Web2 logins (GitHub, Google, Discord). This integration removes complexity from blockchain interactions, making them invisible to end users while providing developers with streamlined onboarding tools. The partnership includes NEAR Foundation credits to support up to 500,000 blockchain account creations.

Ecosystem

DeFi

RHEA Finance launches $RHEA token following the merger of Ref Finance and Burrow Finance, creating a unified DeFi protocol with chain-abstracted liquidity. The platform supports cross-chain access across NEAR, EVM chains, Bitcoin, Zcash, and XRP through NEAR's Chain Signatures technology. RHEA plans to introduce an AI-powered Vault using NEAR Shade Agents for automated yield optimization across chains.
NEAR Foundation makes a strategic investment in Everclear, a cross-chain clearing and settlement protocol for stablecoins and digital assets. Everclear integrates with NEAR Intents as a technical enabler and rebalancing mechanism, enabling frictionless multi-chain liquidity with automated on-chain rebalancing and netting capabilities. The partnership aims to scale liquidity and target billions in monthly volume over the next 12 months.

Enterprise and RWAs

PublicAI introduces a platform that democratizes AI by connecting over 1.8 million people to AI data creation tasks, rewarding contributors with $PUBLIC tokens. The platform serves as a marketplace where businesses can access high-quality, specialized data while contributors earn rewards for providing audio samples, image identification, and other AI training data. Built on NEAR Protocol, PublicAI has generated over $14M in revenue from data licensing to AI partners.
NEAR Foundation partners with IQ AI to advance tokenized AI agents that can operate autonomously across multiple chains. IQ AI integrates NEAR Intents into its Agent Development Kit, enabling agents to autonomously trade, stake, and interact across chains. The partnership includes mutual token acquisitions, with BrainDAO acquiring NEAR tokens and NEAR Foundation acquiring IQ and FRAX tokens to support the tokenized AI economy and NEAR Intents liquidity.
ConsumerFi introduces a platform that empowers consumers by enabling them to monetize their data through personalized AI agents. The platform features a 'Consumer Graph' that combines social capital, financial interactions, and digital footprints into a portable dataset owned by users. Built on NEAR, ConsumerFi enables personalized content creation, simplified DeFi access, and fair reward systems for consumer data and interactions.

NEAR Intents

NEAR intents have also seen strong adoption this quarter, paving the way for frictionless cross-chain swaps and beyond. For users, this abstracts away the complexity of interacting with individual smart contracts and protocols. Instead, they can simply express their desired action and execute things like trading very intuitively. For example, “swap my BTC for SOL” and the system handles routing, chain selection and execution behind the scenes.

Solvers (market makers) compete to fulfil the request in the most optimal way, so users no longer need to manually bridge assets, switch chains or call complex smart contracts. Today, users can swap between native tokens of the following chains such as: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, XRP, NEAR, Zcash and Sui. Cardano recently announced an integration, along with Stellar, Tron and Sui. To learn more about how NEAR intents work, see the official documentation.

Onchain Data

Daily Transactions

NEAR demonstrated robust transactional throughput throughout Q3 2025, maintaining an average of 4.6 million daily transactions with consistent activity across the quarter. Transaction volumes showed remarkable stability, mostly ranging from 4.5 million to 4.8 million daily transactions, reflecting strong protocol usage and sustained dApp engagement. The network's performance remained resilient throughout the quarter, with peak activity reaching 5.6 million transactions and maintaining healthy baseline levels above 4.5 million. This consistent throughput underscores NEAR's capacity to handle high-volume AI agent interactions, DeFi operations, and cross-chain activities enabled by NEAR Intents and Chain Signatures technology.

There is one outlier with lower transactions in mid July, coinciding with the Squarespace outage which made the website near.org, as well as related dApps which relied on RPC services hosted on near.org, unavailable for a short time period. Most importantly though, this did not affect the NEAR blockchain itself or its security and user funds at all, and further proved the necessity for the decentralization of critical (financial) infrastructure.

Daily Active Addresses

NEAR maintained a strong base of active addresses throughout Q3 2025, averaging 314,556 daily active addresses with consistent user engagement across the ecosystem. Activity levels remained stable between 320,000-340,000 daily active addresses for most of the quarter, demonstrating sustained participation from users and developers building on the network. The consistent user base reflects the growing adoption of NEAR's AI-focused infrastructure, with users engaging across various applications including PublicAI's data marketplace, RHEA Finance's unified DeFi platform, and various AI agent protocols. This steady user engagement supports NEAR's position as the blockchain for AI, providing a reliable foundation for user-owned AI applications and cross-chain interactions.

Top Entities by Users and Transactions

NEAR's Q3 2025 entity distribution highlights a diverse ecosystem anchored by infrastructure, DeFi protocols, and AI-focused applications. HOT Wallet dominated both user activity (>100x number of active addresses than the next entity) and transaction volume (56.1% of transactions), reflecting its role as a primary wallet infrastructure for the NEAR ecosystem. Kaikai, an AI-powered, opt-in interactive lock screen and mobile app, captured 35.9% of transaction volume, indicating significant adoption. The native NEAR infrastructure accounted for 3.1% of transactions with over 217k users, showing healthy protocol-level engagement. DeFi protocols like Ref Finance demonstrated strong growth with 92.0% quarter-over-quarter user growth, while stablecoin activity through Tether showed 30.1% user growth, reflecting increased demand for cross-chain liquidity flows enabled by NEAR Intents. This distribution underscores NEAR's evolution into a comprehensive AI blockchain with robust DeFi infrastructure, cross-chain capabilities, and growing ecosystem diversity supporting the tokenized AI economy.

Closing Thoughts

Q3 2025 has reaffirmed NEAR's strength as the premier blockchain for AI: daily transactions maintained robust throughput at 4.6 million average with consistent stability, while active addresses remained steady at 314,556 daily average, reflecting enduring demand for its AI-focused infrastructure. The network's strategic initiatives, announcing NEARCON 2026, partnering with Aptos and Shelby for cross-chain capabilities, and advancing tokenized AI agents through IQ AI, demonstrate a clear commitment to building the infrastructure for the agentic economy.

By launching PublicAI's data marketplace, supporting RHEA Finance's unified DeFi protocol, and enabling ConsumerFi's personalized AI agents, NEAR is actively fostering the tokenized AI economy while maintaining its position as a high-performance blockchain. The ecosystem's growth is evident in Ref Finance's 92% and Tether’s 30% quarter-over-quarter user growth, reflecting increased cross-chain liquidity flows enabled by NEAR Intents and Chain Signatures technology.

NEAR's comprehensive approach to AI infrastructure, combining user-owned AI applications, cross-chain interoperability, and developer-friendly tools, positions the network as the foundational layer for the next generation of decentralized AI applications. With reliable performance, growing ecosystem diversity, and strategic partnerships across the AI and DeFi sectors, NEAR enters Q4 poised to further establish itself as the blockchain where AI agents can operate autonomously and users can truly own their data and AI interactions.