NEAR Protocol Hits Staking Milestone, Unlocks Private AI Models

NEAR Protocol has reached a significant milestone in its staking program. Over 500,000 NEAR tokens are now staked to power private AI on the NEAR AI Cloud. This unlocks more than 40 AI models from prominent labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The staking process is straightforward: holders lock their NEAR coins in a wallet, which earns normal yield while also generating AI credits. These credits can be used to access private AI services without using the holder's own tokens.

Users can link their NEAR wallet to cloud.near.ai to start accessing these AI models. The staked coins remain unused and are returned in full after a wait period, with no additional fees or charges.

This development builds on NEAR's existing work in the space and marks a step towards its goal of enabling secure and private AI compute access for all users.