Overview

Q4 2025 was a defining quarter for NEAR. NEAR achieved a publicly verifiable 1 million TPS benchmark, continued the rapid expansion of NEAR Intents as the fastest-growing cross-chain execution layer for both DeFi and agentic payments, and launched NEAR AI Cloud, the first AI infrastructure to deliver hardware-enforced confidential inference with cryptographic proof of every computation.

The Agentic Economy is arriving faster than most infrastructure is prepared to handle. Enterprises are deploying autonomous agents for capital allocation, procurement, and operations. Agentic payments—transactions initiated, routed, and settled by AI agents without human intervention—are the next frontier of digital commerce, and they require infrastructure that is simultaneously high-throughput, interoperable across chains, and confidential by design.

NEAR’s stack uniquely addresses all three requirements: NEAR Protocol provides the settlement substrate, NEAR Intents provides the universal cross-chain execution layer, and NEAR AI provides confidential, verifiable inference for agents that handle sensitive workflows. Together, these three capabilities form a vertically integrated stack for agentic commerce. (For a comprehensive overview of NEAR's full product architecture, see the NEAR: The Definitive Guide.) Now live on mainnet for over 5 years, NEAR has evolved far beyond a sharded blockchain into the unified commerce layer for assets and agents.

Q4 2025 also advanced NEAR’s tokenomics and governance for the next phase of growth. The Halving Upgrade reduced maximum annual inflation by 50%, and House of Stake launched as NEAR’s decentralized governance system with binding community decisions already live. The quarter’s achievements position NEAR at a critical inflection point as the agentic economy accelerates into 2026.

Key Developments: Q4 2025

• NEAR Protocol achieved 1 million transactions per second in a publicly verifiable benchmark, validating the horizontal scaling thesis of sharded blockchain architecture for both cross-chain DeFi and the agentic economy.
• NEAR AI Cloud launched, introducing hardware-backed confidential inference with cryptographic attestations—with production deployments serving users through Brave Nightly and OpenMind.
• NEAR Intents surpassed $7B in all-time cross-chain volume across 13M+ swaps, 125+ assets, and 25+ blockchains, with 1.6M+ unique users, establishing it as the fastest-growing cross-chain infrastructure.
• NEAR completed the Halving Upgrade, reducing maximum annual inflation from 5% to 2.5% for more sustainable tokenomics.
• House of Stake launched as NEAR’s next-generation governance system, with binding community proposals already passed for validator support and veNEAR holder incentives.
• SovereignAI (Nasdaq: SVRN) launched with a NEAR-based digital asset treasury following a $120M PIPE investment, marking one of the most significant institutional validations of NEAR’s role as infrastructure for the agentic economy.

Protocol: Sharded Scalability for the Agentic Economy

1 Million TPS Benchmark

In a publicly verifiable benchmark, NEAR achieved 1 million transactions per second using real NEAR core code, affordable consumer-grade hardware, and publicly available scripts across 70 shards with 1M accounts per shard and native token transfers—reproducible by any independent party. This result demonstrates that NEAR’s horizontal scaling architecture can meet the throughput demands of global agentic activity, well beyond the capacity of traditional payment networks. As AI agents increasingly initiate, route, and settle agentic payments autonomously, the ability to handle high-volume transaction flows without congestion or cost spikes is a core infrastructure requirement. NEAR’s sharded architecture scales capacity by adding shards rather than increasing individual node performance—a design that maps directly to the elastic, unpredictable demand patterns of agentic workloads.

Scaling Architecture

2025 saw NEAR's shard count grow to 9 across multiple upgrades, with each expansion delivering measurable throughput increases. By year-end, dynamic resharding was fully established: the protocol can continue adding shards as agent-driven activity and Intents volume grow, without protocol changes. NEAR also shipped sharded smart contracts on mainnet, implemented global contracts, and expanded the maximum validator set from 300 to 500, strengthening both decentralization and execution capacity. These structural improvements compound: more shards mean more parallelism, more validators mean more decentralization, and dynamic resharding means NEAR has significant headroom for capacity.

NEAR Intents: Cross-Chain Execution for DeFi and Agentic Payments

NEAR Intents closed 2025 as the fastest-growing cross-chain execution layer in the ecosystem, surpassing $7B in all-time volume across 13M+ swaps, 125+ assets, and 25+ connected blockchains—with 1.6M+ unique users transacting across the network.

NEAR Intents’ architecture is built around outcome-driven transactions: rather than juggling gas, manually managing bridges, and stitching transactions together, users simply express their intent—"swap BTC for USDC on Ethereum"—and a competitive solver network handles execution at optimal price. Solvers are themselves increasingly autonomous agents, competing programmatically to fill intents at the best available terms. Intents provides a credibly neutral execution layer where both human users and AI agents can transact without managing underlying complexity.

NEAR Intents has enabled cross-chain connections that isolated bridge infrastructure cannot. In Q4, NEAR Intents facilitated the first-ever ZEC-on-Solana connection—a pairing that would be technically and economically impractical through conventional bridging.

The volume growth reflects a structural shift in how cross-chain demand is being served: away from isolated bridges and centralized liquidity providers, toward unified liquidity and outcome-based execution. As agentic payments scale, NEAR Intents’ first-mover depth in solver liquidity and chain coverage compounds into a durable structural advantage.

Distribution

NEAR Intents' distribution footprint expanded substantially through 2025. Major protocol integrations included CoW Swap, ThorSwap, Rango Exchange, ShapeShift, Rubic Exchange, and Infinex, alongside infrastructure partners SwapKit, HOT Bridge, and Rhea. New chain integrations shipped regularly through Q4—including Starknet, Monad, and Bitcoin Cash—bringing the total to 25+ connected blockchains spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Zcash, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, and Polygon. Wallet support expanded to Ledger, Zashi, Trust Wallet, OneKey, CoolWallet, SafePal, Bitget Wallet, Coin98, Ellipal, Keystone, Zypto, Ctrl, Hasher Wallet, and ThorWallet. The breadth of distribution is itself a moat: NEAR Intents is not a single-ecosystem product but a universal execution layer with reach across the full cross-chain landscape.

NEAR AI: Confidential Infrastructure for a User-Owned AI Economy

The launch of NEAR AI Cloud introduced a new category of AI infrastructure: hardware-backed, verifiable private inference designed for the agentic economy. The core problem NEAR AI solves is not model capability—it is trust. Enterprises cannot route sensitive data through AI infrastructure they cannot inspect, and existing "private" AI modes offer no proof of isolation, access, or deletion. NEAR AI solves this at the hardware level: every inference runs inside Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential Computing environments, sealed and inaccessible even to NEAR AI itself, with signed cryptographic attestations from both Intel TDX and NVIDIA TEE that any party can independently verify. This is a hardware guarantee, not a software promise.

For agentic deployments specifically, the trust requirement is more acute. An agent handling financial flows, healthcare decisions, or enterprise procurement must prove that its reasoning happened in a sealed environment and that its outputs are auditable. NEAR AI Cloud provides this at production scale: at launch it was already serving Brave Nightly and OpenMind under real operational conditions—high-volume traffic, deterministic latency, and compliance requirements that shaped the platform before public availability. NEAR Private Chat applies the same guarantees to consumer use cases: financial planning, legal research, medical questions—anywhere software-level privacy assurances are insufficient.

NEAR also partnered with ADI Chain and Datrics to launch TravAI, an AI-driven travel management platform. TravAI uses NEAR Intents to enable users to pay with any crypto asset while settlement occurs automatically on ADI Chain—agents autonomously coordinate multi-step commercial transactions including flight and hotel bookings with instant blockchain settlement. TravAI is an early demonstration of what agentic payments look like at the application layer: agents as the commercial interface, NEAR as the full stack beneath them.

Economics

Q4 2025 marked a significant structural shift in NEAR’s tokenomics, with the Halving Upgrade and growing NEAR Intents revenue creating the conditions for NEAR to accelerate a deflationary economic flywheel through increased network usage and ecosystem growth.

The Halving Upgrade

NEAR completed the Halving Upgrade in Q4 2025, reducing maximum annual inflation from 5% to 2.5%—cutting new token issuance in half and marking a new chapter in sustainable tokenomics for NEAR. With $NEAR fully unlocked more than five years post-mainnet and no remaining unlock cliffs, NEAR is among the most mature cryptoeconomic ecosystems in the industry. The Halving Upgrade, combined with NEAR Intents fee revenue scaling into Q1 2026, are the key developments in NEAR's goal toward net deflation.

Institutional Validation

OceanPal Inc. announced a $120M PIPE investment to launch SovereignAI (Nasdaq: SVRN), a wholly owned subsidiary focused on commercializing the NEAR Protocol and building blockchain-native, confidential AI infrastructure. SovereignAI intends to accumulate NEAR with the objective of acquiring at least 10% of the total NEAR token supply over time, making it the leading public investment vehicle for exposure to NEAR and the infrastructure enabling agentic commerce.

The announcement arrived alongside a growing roster of regulated $NEAR investment products spanning multiple jurisdictions: the Grayscale NEAR Trust (GSNR) began public trading on OTCQB in September 2025 and filed for NYSE Arca listing in January 2026; the Bitwise and 21Shares NEAR Staking ETPs provide European institutional investors with regulated staking-yield exposure on Deutsche Börse Xetra; and the Valour NEAR SEK ETP extends access to Nordic retail investors via Avanza and Nordnet. On December 30, Bitwise filed with the SEC for a dedicated NEAR Strategy ETF.

Governance

NEAR launched House of Stake as its next-generation governance system in October 2025. The system uses veNEAR (vote-escrowed NEAR) for stake-weighted governance. Binding community decisions were already live in Q4, covering validator support (HSP-002) and veNEAR holder incentives (HSP-003). House of Stake represents a multi-phase governance transformation, with a roadmap to incorporate AI agents as first-class governance participants—a signal that NEAR’s governance architecture is designed for the agentic future its infrastructure enables. House of Stake is also partnering with Stanford OpenLab on joint AI governance research.

Ecosystem

Developer Tooling

2025 saw the NEAR ecosystem’s developer tooling mature significantly across documentation, language support, onboarding, and wallet infrastructure. A consolidated documentation site streamlined resource discovery at the start of the year. Language support expanded with official Python SDK support for smart contracts, plus experimental SDKs for Go, Kotlin, C#, and Elixir. The JavaScript ecosystem received a major update to near-api-js alongside community alternatives near-kit and near-api-ts. New JSON RPC clients launched for TypeScript, Rust, Kotlin, and Swift. All core tooling—CLIs, APIs, and SDKs—was updated to support Global Smart Contracts.

Developer experience improvements centered on wallet infrastructure and onboarding. Social logins via Privy dramatically simplified account creation for consumer-facing applications. The NEAR Wallet Selector received two major updates with improved developer experience, and HOT launched a zero-dependency alternative prioritizing speed and security. React Hooks for Wallet Selector simplified frontend integration. These improvements collectively lower the barrier to building agentic applications on NEAR, where agent onboarding and key management are critical developer surfaces.

NEAR Legion

NEAR Legion is a global community of builders and advocates organized around NEAR’s AI and crypto mission. With 4,100+ active members and legionnaires mapped across the world, NEAR Legion organizes community effort through missions, skillcapes, and rewards that direct participation toward NEAR ecosystem growth. NEAR Legion represents a new model of community-driven distribution—a committed, $NEAR-holding community building, practicing, and advocating for a user-owned AI economy. Its global footprint and structured incentive model make it a meaningful driver of grassroots ecosystem growth as NEAR scales into new markets.

Onchain Data

NEAR Intents Volume

The most significant onchain metric for NEAR’s current growth thesis is NEAR Intents volume. From near-zero in late 2024, cumulative Intents volume grew throughout 2025 to surpass $7B by end of Q4, with monthly volume accelerating through Q3 and Q4 as wallet and protocol integrations compounded. The volume trajectory reflects a protocol that has found product-market fit: each distribution expansion—new chains, new wallets, new protocol integrations—compounds into higher baseline volume rather than one-off spikes. With the NEAR Intents fee switch now live—an automatic revenue-sharing mechanism with all payouts denominated in $NEAR—protocol revenue scales directly with Intents volume.

Ecosystem Composition

NEAR Protocol processed 54 million total transactions and served 20 million users across Q4 2025, averaging 4.2 million daily transactions. HOT Wallet led transaction volume with 28.8 million transactions (53.3% of total). Native NEAR infrastructure showed 8.4% quarter-over-quarter transaction growth, and stablecoin adoption through Tether grew 29.0% QoQ—reflecting ecosystem diversification and maturation beyond wallet infrastructure. The entity distribution reflects NEAR’s expanding utility across DeFi protocols, stablecoin usage, and cross-chain applications powered by NEAR Intents. Source: Nansen Query - Top Entities by Transactions.

Closing Thoughts

Q4 2025 demonstrated the coherence of NEAR’s thesis as the unified commerce layer for the agentic economy: NEAR Protocol as the high-throughput settlement substrate, NEAR Intents as the universal cross-chain protocol, and NEAR AI as the confidential inference infrastructure agents need to handle sensitive workflows at scale. No single competitor has assembled all three. The vertical integration is NEAR's unique advantage.

Q1 2026 arrived with the stack becoming operational. NEARCON 2026 in San Francisco marked the launch of IronClaw, a confidential runtime for always-on AI agents; Confidential Intents, confidential cross-chain execution built directly into NEAR Intents; near.com, a consumer super-app connecting 35+ chains through a single account; and the NEAR AI Agent Market, the first native marketplace for agent-to-agent commerce. These are not isolated announcements—they are the unified commerce layer going live, product by product.

NEAR is approaching a critical inflection point. The 1 million TPS benchmark, $7B+ in Intents volume, and NEAR AI Cloud serving production workloads at launch establish the infrastructure foundation. The Halving Upgrade and growing Intents fee revenue establish the tokenomics conditions. The Q1 2026 product launches establish the application layer where agentic commerce will actually flow. NEAR Intents volume growth and NEAR AI enterprise adoption are the leading indicators to watch—both for NEAR's trajectory toward upgraded tokenomics and for NEAR's position as the foundational protocol for the agentic economy.