This month in NEAR: ✦ NEAR Intents hit $570M+ in total volume, with 1.2M+ total swaps and 100+ supported assets. ✦ NEAR Staking ETP launched with Bitwise, one of the world’s largest crypto index fund managers with $12B+ in AUM. ✦ NEAR partnered with Everclear, a clearing and settlement protocol with $1B+ in total transaction volume. ✦ NEAR Intents integrated with Sui, a top 10 DeFi chain with $2B+ TVL. ✦ NEAR-native stablecoins now supported on BitGo to expand institutional-grade coverage of NEAR assets. ✦ NEAR House of Stake AI Copilot proof of concept from Meta Pool. ✦ NEAR Intents Launchpad (Calyx) now live to power 2025 token season. ✦ Shade Agent Sandbox released for devs to launch verifiable AI agents with NEAR’s stack. ✦ SurgeSwap alpha go live, 1-click cross-chain swaps using NEAR Intents. ✦ MoreMarkets mainnet launch, using NEAR’s Chain Signatures to unlock cross-chain liquidity. ✦ HOT Craft launch, the first chain-abstracted NFT marketplace, powered by NEAR Intents. And much more. NEAR ecosystem is shipping and will keep shipping 🚢

🚀 NEW EPISODE 🚀 Scaling the Agentic Internet @tw_tter chats with @bowenwang18, Head of Protocol @ Near One, about blockchain scaling, AI, and how @NEARProtocol sets the ground for AI-native apps & the agentic economy. ‘Attention Is All You Need’, co-wrote by Illia Polosukhin in 2017, laid the foundation for arguably one of the most consequential tech breakthroughs in our recent history. 1 year later, Illia founded Near AI, which later became @NEARProtocol. They were visionaries ahead of their time and, although AI took several more years before becoming a viable product, the experience of scaling databases would later prove valuable and applicable in blockchain world. As a result, @NEARProtocol is one of the first blockchains to implement execution layer sharding, asynchronous execution and stateless validation, bringing the finality time down to 1.2 seconds, with a block time of 0.6 seconds. Don't forget to RT & follow @epicenterbtc! Topics discussed in this episode: 0:00 - Introduction 3:30 - Bowen’s background 4:47 - Near’s pivot from AI to blockchains 8:26 - The role of Near One 9:13 - Near’s tech stack upgrades 13:39 - Optimizing network architecture 17:08 - Stateless validation & block propagation 21:10 - Sharding & asynchronous execution 29:12 - Message passing between shards & shard ‘equality’ 35:51 - Challenges of implementing stateless validation 41:05 - Applications benefiting from Near’s finality speed 44:18 - Intent-based infrastructure 47:10 - AI use cases on Near 52:27 - Expanding Near’s ecosystem 54:43 - Development challenges 57:55 - Near’s vision and goals