NEAR AI lets users stake tokens for private AI compute, crossing 500,000 NEAR staked

NEAR Protocol has quietly built one of the more interesting bridges between crypto staking and AI infrastructure. Its NEAR AI division launched a “Staking for NEAR AI” feature on July 30, and within roughly two weeks, users had locked up more than 500,000 NEAR tokens to fund confidential AI workloads. The core idea: instead of paying for AI compute with a credit card like you would with OpenAI or Anthropic, you stake NEAR tokens and receive recurring compute credits. Your principal stays intact, the yield gets redirected into AI inference costs. How the staking math works The economics follow a straightforward linear model. Staking 500 NEAR generates roughly $5 in monthly AI compute credits. That works out to a clean 100:1 ratio between tokens staked and dollar-equivalent credits earned per month. Those credits are both withdrawable and non-expendable on the principal side, meaning users can pull their staked NEAR back at any time without losing the base position. The compute credits themselves fund what NEAR calls “confidential inference,” which is AI model execution that happens inside hardware-isolated secure environments. A minimum stake of 50 NEAR is required to activate the f...