NEAR’s New Token Utility and AI Economy | Illia Polosukhin

The integration of the NEAR AI cloud with the NEAR token establishes a decentralized, verifiable, and confidential platform for AI inference. By staking NEAR, users gain access to AI capabilities, effectively creating a "universal basic AI" utility. This infrastructure prioritizes end-to-end confidentiality and verifiability, allowing users to bypass the censorship and opaque data handling common in centralized AI models. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, details how this vertically integrated stack—combining blockchain, confidential intents, and AI cloud—supports the emergence of autonomous businesses. These agents operate continuously, utilizing NEAR as a secure, on-chain layer for financial settlement and coordination. This architecture shifts the AI industry toward a model where users maintain sovereignty over their prompts and data, while enabling agents to perform complex, multi-step tasks without constant human intervention.