The future is NEAR. Introducing $NRR—the Bitwise NEAR ETF—giving investors exposure to the emerging agentic economy. $NRR is the first spot $NEAR ETP in the U.S. and offers in-house staking to maximize NEAR's ~5% staking rewards.* Why @NEARprotocol? ↳ Built at the intersection of AI x crypto by foundational AI researchers: The team helped shape modern AI, and now they're building its transaction layer. ↳ Growing quickly: NEAR Intents has processed $32B+ in volume, up from under $1B a year ago. ↳ Designed for security: NEAR Intents settle cross-chain transactions through smart contracts to avoid the potential risks of centralized bridges. ↳ Made for scale: Transactions finalize in ~1.2 seconds and cost a fraction of a cent. ↳ Smart tokenomics: With a ~$6B market cap, NEAR's supply is fully unlocked, inflation was recently halved to 2.5% per year, and fees now fund buybacks. Why in-house staking? Staking in-house brings Bitwise's institutional expertise directly to NRR investing with transparency, security, and oversight. As AI and crypto converge, the Bitwise NEAR ETF ($NRR) gives investors straightforward exposure to the network leading the charge. Learn more at nrretf.com

There are ton of new and old devs building on NEAR in the past couple of weeks. Building itself got easier too, so it's really about what to build and how stand out to get distribution. Few ideas I wanted to share: - AI Tamagochi - use @near_ai to run verifiable inference from prompt encoded onchain, have each character as NFT with some $NEAR attached that pays for it's inference, add gamification with feeding, dressing. Can add all kinds of things on top with battle arena, competitions, etc. - Universal checkout widget - let any merchant/app to add "checkout" button that allows to pay via intents from whatever wallet and chain user has. Offer it to merchants, try to get it into Shopify. - AI encyclopedia with prediction markets - instead of community curation, every fact becomes a perpetual truth seeking market (Augur style). The final pages are generated by AI based on current market understanding. - Private OTC market using 'private deals' from NEAR Intents. Currently there is no way to find counter party unless you already know you are transacting with. Create a more open way to communicate what are deals open and allow people to fill them via NEAR Intents. - "Never get liquidated" - manage positions via NEAR Intents to keep lending and perp positions to maximize interest while not getting liquidated - Event registration where funds get escrowed and let the host to check in guests. If guests have showed up - they split all contributed funds (prev project was called Kickback). Make crypto side events signups reliable again, now across any chain and any asset. - Code review that is fully private - agent that verifiably privately runs code review on private PRs using @near_ai - Company cap table + all instruments around it to raise funds, accept crypto and support banking - Delta neutral anything - take spot + perp controlled via NEAR contract that manages it via NEAR Intents. - Private trading where you sell your viewing keys for people to follow/copy trade. NEAR Intents confidential trading is all private and so one can have a social trading app where people sell "keys" for only select people to see. PnL can be publicly displayed so people can choose to buy-in. - Private medical second opinion - medical frontend that e2e encrypts and sends your data to NEAR AI to get second opinion from AI in guaranteed private way. Use it in combination with crypto and fiat payments. Allow to have custom prompts in NFTs that people can use as a way to get better expertise out of agents. - Private Granola - desktop app that uses @near_ai to do private transcriptions but keeps all your records with you (and encrypted with your key backups). Use $NEAR staking as an alterantive to pay subscriptions. - AI benchmarking with private test sets. Submit harness (or new model in hosted privately in @near_ai) and evaluate on private tests sets and see results that are certified for given model and given hash of test set, without revealing any data. Distribution: - Engage @NEARLegion - Make sure your app supports every wallet via @aurora Intent Connect, so user from any chain can engage with it without bridging/figuring out NEAR - Engage other communities by cross pollinating - Don't forget about Product Hunt & similar product distribution - And ofc X

We just launched the reimagined near​.com. Crypto, stocks, perps, and yield share one consistent design. Home rolls it all into one total. ⌘K searches everything. Same features. But an amazing new experience. We hope you love using it as much as we loved building it. ❤️

INSIDE NEAR PROTOCOL The settlement layer for the agent economy. 1M+ TPS in a verifiable benchmark. Dynamic resharding live. Post-quantum signing live. 5+ years of mainnet, 100% uptime. NEAR shipped years ago what much of the industry is still planning 🧵

NEAR AI has claimed first place on the Lean Eval v1 leaderboard. Lean Eval v1 is an active benchmark maintained by Lean FRO that contains extremely hard formalization problems. We reached first place despite joining the competition just four weeks ago, a full month later than other top participants. NEAR is very heavily investing in formal verification efforts. Our ultimate goal is to formally prove the protocol and all the core contracts, and to provide a practical tool for others to formally verify their contracts in a fast and affordable way. The system that enabled us to claim first place is almost entirely powered by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and thus is (a) extremely cheap, and (b) has no dependencies on third parties because the model is open weight. When it comes to formally verifying software, the approach boils down to three pillars: 1. Representing the program in a way that can be reasoned about; 2. Expressing the properties that we desire to prove; 3. Coming up with a proof and formalizing it in Lean. Until recently, step (3) was prohibitively expensive for practical use at scale. With the system that we used for Lean Eval, we now have it solved. Stay tuned for updates on how we apply it in practice to formally verify NEAR contracts.

The funds from the $3.8M NEAR Intents exploit have been returned, just one day later, and the investigation is closed. Thanks to SHIELD, the AI security layer on Intents, along with some aggressive detective work, the Intents team identified the party responsible less than 24h after the hack, established communication, and got the funds back in full at 14:30 UTC today. Thank you to @alexauroradev and the whole @near_intents team for this fast and clean resolution – as well as the broader @NEARProtocol ecosystem and SHIELD partners for the support and help. There’s been relentless work over the past 24 hours by so many people to make this right and it is a great testament to this community’s values and determination. To echo Alex: for security researchers looking for exploits, we encourage you to use bug bounties. They exist for a reason. At NEAR, we believe that privacy is a right, but not as a way to facilitate crime. Our technology is built to expand human agency and opportunity, not to facilitate criminal activity. The events of the last week have shown the value of SHIELD to find suspicious activity before things escalate too far, as well as to accelerate resolution so the vast majority of legitimate users are not affected. Confidentiality cannot come at the expense of lawfulness and I strongly believe it doesn’t have to. We’ve learned a great deal from this incident and work is already underway to harden our security systems and further adapt to the changing cybersecurity landscape. AI may be accelerating exploits, but it can also help us defend against them. I hope our entire industry responds with vigilance and feels the same sense of urgency to work together.

INSIDE NEAR AI Otherwise known as user-owned AI. Confidential inference leveraged by Venice, Brave, a cross-border payment platform, a national government, and more. AI that runs where the operator can't see it. How NEAR helps enterprises and users own their intelligence 🧵

September belonged to crypto x artificial intelligence (AI): $NEAR up 183% $VVV up 70% $WLD up 47% $TAO up 37% Grayscale's Artificial Intelligence Crypto Sector returned 54% for the month, versus 24% for the broader crypto market. The move may reflect growing interest in blockchain as potential infrastructure for AI. Read more on The Stack here: grayscale.com/the-stack/the-… Learn more about the Artifical Intelligence Crypto Sector here: institute.grayscale.com/cour…

Wanted to move away from OpenAI and Anthropic, so I built a #VSCode extension that brings @near_ai private inference directly into #Copilot Use SOTA models and keep your chats private and secure, with cryptographic attestations to verify that Available @ marketplace.visualstudio.com…

Claude Opus 5.5 is live on NEAR AI Cloud. Always-on adaptive reasoning, 1M context, 128K output, built for long-running agentic coding. $4/$20 per MTok. Try it free in the playground: near.ai/models/anthropic/cla…

Earlier today NEAR Intents services were stopped after a security incident was detected. The incident was caused by a bug in the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with NEAR Intents smart contract. The preliminary report indicates the total loss of approximately $3.8M. These funds will be compensated in full. The contract-side vulnerability has been patched. The operations of the NEAR Intents and near(.)com are expected to resume within 1h. Deposits and withdrawals on the following networks will remain unavailable for an additional ~12 hours while fixes to the Omni infrastructure are completed: BSC, Polygon, TON, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, Monad, LayerX, Adi, Scroll and Plasma. In case users hold any assets from these chains inside NEAR Intents (for example, in HOT wallet or on near(.)com), they will be able to swap them into other assets once NEAR Intents is back up (in ~1h). The incident has been reported to law enforcement, and we are working with security and blockchain analytics partners to trace the funds and pursue recovery. A detailed report will be shared publicly in the following days.

near:native spot on Hyperliquid was deployed by @NEARProtocol themselves and is seeing strong success, currently ranking 7th in 24h spot volume, just behind Unit tokens and HYPE. It already has over 679 holders and $12,001,521 in TVL.