NEAR Protocol launched in 2020, founded by Illia Polosukhin (who co-authored the foundational “Attention Is All You Need” AI paper) and Alexander Skidanov. NEAR used a sharding approach called Nightshade to achieve high throughput, and its account model was designed to be human-friendly — users could have readable account names (like alice.near) instead of hexadecimal addresses. The UX-first philosophy set NEAR apart from more technically focused L1s.
NEAR’s ecosystem grew modestly through 2021-2023, attracting projects like Ref Finance (DEX), Burrow (lending), and several gaming applications. But NEAR never achieved the explosive growth of Solana or the institutional gravity of Ethereum. The chain occupied an awkward middle ground: technically competent but lacking the killer app or narrative that would attract mass attention.
The pivot to chain abstraction in 2024 gave NEAR a new identity. NEAR’s chain signatures technology let users interact with any blockchain (Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana) through their NEAR account, without needing wallets on each chain. The vision: a single NEAR account that could sign transactions on every chain, making the multi-chain experience invisible to users. This positioning aligned NEAR with the chain abstraction narrative and gave it a differentiated role in the ecosystem.
Polosukhin’s AI background also positioned NEAR uniquely at the intersection of AI and crypto. NEAR.AI, the protocol’s AI research arm, worked on AI agent infrastructure and privacy-preserving AI computation. Whether NEAR can leverage its founder’s credibility in AI to capture value at the AI-crypto intersection — while also winning the chain abstraction race — depends on execution across two ambitious bets simultaneously. It’s a lot of plates to spin, but the intellectual firepower behind the project is genuine.
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