NEAR Staking Now Allocates AI Inference, Turning Token Into 'AI Money'

NEAR Protocol's co-founder Illia Polosukhin has been making waves in the crypto and AI communities. In an interview on Bankless in August 2026, he revealed that staking NEAR now directly allocates AI inference, turning the token into a claim on compute inside a verifiable environment.

The key to this upgrade lies in the combination of confidentiality and verifiability, which is necessary for autonomous agents. Polosukhin explained that when autonomous agents are transacting, not just humans chatting with a model, verifiability stops being a nice-to-have and becomes mandatory.

NEAR's AI Cloud offers two unique properties: confidentiality, where no third party can observe prompts or responses; and verifiability, which means every inference returns an attestation of the model hash, prompt, output, signed by the specific GPU and Intel CPU that processed it. This creates a chain of provenance visible in the platform's front end.

The NEAR AI Cloud has been bootstrapped with the team's own GPUs, but a marketplace for third-party providers is under development. Third parties onboard, verify they hold the right hardware, and earn NEAR emissions proportional to the inference they serve.