NEAR Just Turned Staking Yield Into Compute

NEAR’s integration of its AI cloud with the NEAR token creates a vertically integrated stack where staking enables access to confidential, verifiable AI inference. By serving open-weight models through trusted execution environments, the platform ensures user prompts and responses remain private and uncensored, addressing concerns about centralized AI filtering. This model transforms NEAR into a sovereign security layer for AI, where staking provides "universal basic AI" capacity and emissions incentivize a decentralized marketplace for compute. The architecture supports autonomous agents that can operate, settle transactions, and interact with real-world assets securely. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin emphasizes that this infrastructure shifts the paradigm from human-directed AI to autonomous businesses, using blockchain as the root of trust for identity, coordination, and value settlement in an increasingly AI-driven economy.