NEAR is undergoing a significant strategic pivot.

In the past, NEAR primarily competed as a high-performance Layer 1, with its selling points centered on sharded scaling, low fees, and fast finality. Now, it aims to reposition itself as the underlying infrastructure for multi-chain transactions and AI agents: users need not understand the complex structure of blockchains, as wallets and agents can automatically handle cross-chain transfers, swaps, and payments.

NEAR Intents has already provided preliminary transaction data for this direction, and the AI business has attracted market attention due to the founding team's technical background. Meanwhile, NEAR has reduced inflation, expanded fee burning, and attempted to use product revenue for token buybacks.

The problem is that these developments have not yet fully translated into sustained demand for the NEAR token. Transaction volume can grow rapidly, but the actual revenue the protocol captures may be limited; AI products can use NEAR's technology, but that does not mean users must hold NEAR.

This makes NEAR a rather representative crypto asset: its technological direction is becoming increasingly clear, while its economic closed loop still awaits validation.

From a single public blockchain to a multi-chain trading gateway

NEAR was initially a general-purpose smart contract platform aimed at consumer-grade applications. Its Nightshade architecture processes network state through sharding, aiming to expand capacity while keeping costs low. According to project disclosures, NEAR currently has a block time of approximately 600 milliseconds and finality of about 1.2 seconds; in 2025, the number of network shards increased from 6 to 9, raising theoretical throughput capacity by about 50%.

These performance metrics are not bad, but in today's public blockchain market they can hardly constitute an independent advantage. Solana, Sui, Aptos, and Ethereum Layer 2 are all offering faster and cheaper transaction experiences. For NEAR, continuing to emphasize TPS and fees will only trap it in homogeneous competition.

As a result, NEAR began shifting its development focus toward "chain abstraction."

Simply put, chain abstraction aims to make users no longer aware of which blockchain they are using, and no longer require them to manually handle cross-chain bridges, Gas tokens, and transaction paths. Users only need to state the outcome they want, and the system can automatically find the appropriate network, liquidity, and execution solution.

NEAR Intents is the most important product in this strategy. Traditional cross-chain transactions usually require users to choose a bridge, a trading platform, and a target network; under the Intents model, users only need to submit a trading intent, and solvers then find the best path across different platforms and liquidity pools.

Data disclosed by NEAR shows that Intents' cumulative cross-chain settlement volume has exceeded $13 billion. Some community statistics provide estimates of $20 billion to $26 billion, covering 30 to 35 blockchains. Although different data may use different time ranges and statistical standards, at least it shows that NEAR Intents has already gained a certain scale of real trading activity.

This has also changed NEAR's potential market. In the past, the growth of a public blockchain mainly depended on developers deploying applications on the chain itself, then attracting users and capital to enter; if the Intents model works, NEAR may participate in asset flows on other blockchains even without hosting all applications, and generate revenue from cross-chain transactions.

However, chain abstraction has an inherent contradiction: the smoother the user experience, the easier it is for the underlying network to be hidden. Users may use the execution capability provided by NEAR without knowing that the transaction went through NEAR, and even less need to directly hold NEAR tokens.

Meanwhile, wallets, aggregators, cross-chain protocols, and other intent networks are all competing for transaction entry points. Even if NEAR Intents' settlement volume continues to expand, most of the fees may flow to solvers, market makers, and partner applications that provide quotes and liquidity. How much revenue NEAR can retain from this is the key to determining its valuation.

AI provides a new narrative, but commercial revenue still needs validation

AI is another main thread of NEAR's strategic pivot.

NEAR is building out autonomous agents, confidential model execution, verifiable AI outputs, agent marketplaces, machine-to-machine payments, and user-owned AI assistants. The project hopes to combine the blockchain's capabilities in accounts, payments, and asset ownership with the autonomous execution capabilities of AI agents.

Compared with some crypto projects that only changed their positioning after the AI boom, NEAR does have a more direct technical foundation. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin previously worked on machine learning research at Google and participated in writing the foundational Transformer architecture paper "Attention Is All You Need"; another co-founder, Alexander Skidanov, has experience in distributed databases and large-scale systems development.

This gives NEAR's AI pivot a certain continuity, rather than merely seeking a hotter market label for its token.

According to project disclosures, NEAR's AI ecosystem already involves more than 50 teams, covering areas such as research, data, storage, models, and applications. Related partnerships or integrations include Frax, Infinex, SWEAT, and Eliza. NEAR is also advancing AI assistants such as IronClaw, hoping to use trusted execution environments, credential isolation, and privacy protection to enable agents to securely access accounts, hold assets, and execute transactions.

There is also a natural intersection between AI and Intents. Future AI agents may need to autonomously purchase services, manage funds, and exchange assets across different blockchains. Intents can help agents find paths and liquidity, while NEAR has the opportunity to become the coordination and settlement layer for these machine-to-machine transactions.

The imaginative potential of this direction is enormous, but commercial evidence remains limited. Having 50 AI teams does not equal having 50 mature revenue sources, and partnerships and product launches do not represent stable paying demand. Centralized AI services already have mature computing power, tools, and enterprise customers, and NEAR must prove that the asset ownership, privacy, and verifiability brought by blockchain are enough to offset the additional technical complexity.

More importantly, even if AI products succeed, the value does not necessarily accrue to the NEAR token. Agents may access services through third-party wallets, fees may be paid by applications on their behalf, and end users may not need to purchase or hold NEAR long-term. Whether AI activity can generate protocol revenue, and whether that revenue can create token demand, remain two questions that have yet to be fully answered.

$13 billion in transaction volume — how much revenue is ultimately left behind?

The most noteworthy aspect of NEAR's current investment thesis is not the transaction scale itself, but the gap between transaction scale and protocol revenue.

According to the revenue dashboard cited in the original article, in the 30 days ending September 1, 2026, NEAR-related products generated approximately $3.48 million in total fees. After deducting fees paid to solvers, partners, applications, and other participants, net protocol fees were approximately $757,500.

In other words, the revenue the protocol actually retains is only a portion of total fees. This distribution is not surprising: cross-chain transactions require solvers to provide quotes, market makers to provide liquidity, and applications and wallets also need to earn revenue. But for NEAR token holders, cross-chain transaction volume and total fees are not the most important figures — net protocol revenue is closer to the economic value that the underlying asset can capture.

Even so, net fees cannot be directly equated with shareholder cash flow. NEAR can use revenue for buybacks, staking, lockups, ecosystem spending, or the protocol treasury, but there is currently no fixed rule requiring all revenue to be used to purchase tokens. The use of funds remains subject to governance decisions.

Therefore, when observing NEAR's fundamentals, looking only at user numbers, transaction counts, or Intents settlement volume can easily overstate the quality of growth. What truly matters are three questions: whether net protocol revenue continues to grow; whether revenue as a share of total transaction fees increases; and how much of that revenue ultimately converts into NEAR purchases, burns, or long-term lockup demand.

If Intents settlement volume grows rapidly while net revenue remains at a low level, then NEAR may become a heavily used infrastructure but not necessarily an asset that can effectively capture value.

NEAR has also been trying to fix this problem in recent years. Its maximum annual inflation rate has been reduced from 5% to approximately 2.5%; the developer gas rebate mechanism has been eliminated, and the related transaction fees will enter the burn process more completely; NEAR Intents has also enabled a fee switch and is attempting to use some product revenue for buybacks. According to project disclosures, related mechanisms have already driven buybacks of more than 1 million NEAR.

The supply structure has also improved. Approximately 1.305 billion NEAR tokens are already fully or nearly fully circulating, with circulating market cap roughly in line with fully diluted valuation. Compared to new public blockchains that still have large amounts of team and investor tokens awaiting unlock, NEAR faces lower concentrated unlock pressure in the future.

But near-full circulation does not equal deflation. NEAR's transaction fees are low, and even with high transaction volumes, the burn rate may not be sufficient to offset new issuance from validator rewards. Buybacks also involve a degree of discretion and have not yet formed a stable, predictable institutional arrangement.

What NEAR needs to prove is not just that its token economics have "improved," but that protocol revenue and fee burns can eventually approach or exceed new issuance. Only by forming this closed loop can product growth reliably translate into token value.

The ecosystem is still growing, but has yet to establish leadership

NEAR's published user and transaction data is quite impressive. Its 2024 review showed that monthly active users grew from 7 million the previous year to 40 million, daily active users stood at approximately 4 million, and average daily transactions exceeded 8 million. Ecosystem projects secured approximately $146 million in external funding that year, and accelerator participant teams also raised about $50.5 million.

These figures at least demonstrate that NEAR is not a "ghost chain" that has lost its developers and users. After enduring the previous bear market, it has retained its network, infrastructure, funding, and application ecosystem.

But blockchain user metrics need to be interpreted with caution. So-called monthly active users may refer to accounts, addresses, or application interaction entities, which may include automated programs, subsidized activities, and low-value transactions, and cannot be directly understood as the number of unique users on an internet platform.

The original article also did not obtain complete, independently verified data on the latest user retention rates, stablecoin scale, TVL, and transaction quality. Therefore, 40 million monthly active users and 8 million daily transactions can prove that the network has activity, but cannot alone prove that this activity will generate sustained revenue.

Developer data presents a similar picture. Data cited from August 2026 in the original article indicates that the NEAR ecosystem has approximately 1,231 developers, 79,400 code commits, and 234 code repositories. Under the same statistical methodology, Solana has approximately 1,494 developers, while Ethereum reaches 11,600.

NEAR clearly has a developer ecosystem that is still operating, but the gap with Ethereum remains significant, and it also lags behind Solana in liquidity and consumer application momentum. Applications such as HOT Wallet, SWEAT, and KAIKAI have brought NEAR a certain user base, but have yet to produce a killer product capable of changing the industry landscape.

NEAR's competition also spans multiple markets. In the base layer public blockchain space, it must compete with Ethereum, Solana, Sui, and Aptos for developers and capital; in the chain abstraction space, it faces wallets, transaction aggregators, cross-chain bridges, and other intent networks; in the AI space, it must also compete with centralized cloud service providers and crypto projects focused on compute, data, models, and privacy.

This gives NEAR both significant optionality and high execution risk. If synergies form across its multiple product lines, NEAR could build a complete system covering accounts, payments, cross-chain interoperability, and AI agents; if resources are overly dispersed, it could end up with many products but a persistently limited market position.

NEAR currently resembles a mid-sized competitor with credible technology and a differentiated direction rather than a market leader that has already established a strong moat.

Core Judgment: NEAR Needs to Prove More Than Just Technology

NEAR's most attractive investment thesis today is becoming the coordination, transaction, and settlement infrastructure for the multi-chain and AI agent economy. If this vision materializes, NEAR's addressable market could be far larger than that of a single Layer 1, and it could establish new value capture pathways through Intents fees, agent payments, and token buybacks.

NEAR's strengths include a strong founding team, a long operational track record, its sharding architecture, a near-fully circulating token structure, a reduced inflation rate, and a differentiated direction formed by AI and chain abstraction.

But its biggest risk may not be technological failure, but rather remaining stuck long-term in a state of "technologically reliable, product-rich, but economically secondary." NEAR may continue to operate steadily, maintain its developer community, and keep launching new products, yet never form a sufficiently strong application network, protocol revenue, and token demand.

The most important metrics to track going forward include NEAR Intents net revenue and profit margin, non-incentivized user retention, stablecoin and TVL growth, real commercial revenue from AI products, the effective token inflation rate, and the transparency of buybacks and treasury funds.

Ultimately, NEAR needs to answer three questions: How much revenue from Intents transaction growth can be retained for the protocol; whether AI and cross-chain products will create direct demand for the NEAR token; and whether protocol revenue, burns, and buybacks can offset new issuance over the long term.

Until these questions are sufficiently validated, NEAR is better viewed as a high-beta asset betting on the development of AI and multi-chain infrastructure. Its technological foundation and product direction offer significant upside, but commercialization capability, value capture, and competitive pressure will still determine whether this transformation can truly bring about a valuation re-rating.

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