NEAR Protocol targets AI-driven commerce with new products and tokenomics improvements

NEAR Protocol has spent the last several months quietly rebuilding its pitch to the market. The layer-1 blockchain, which has championed sharded scalability via its Nightshade technology since mainnet launched over five years ago, is now angling to become the default rails for AI agents conducting commerce across chains.

The market seems to be buying the thesis. The $NEAR token has climbed roughly 115% over the 90-day period leading up to late May 2026, with weekly surges exceeding 50% and daily trading volumes peaking above $1B following key announcements.

What actually changed

Three things happened in relatively quick succession, and each one added fuel to the rally.

First, NEAR completed its Halving Upgrade in Q4 2025. That cut the protocol’s maximum annual inflation rate from 5% to 2.5%, a significant shift given that the token supply is now fully unlocked.

Second, the protocol activated what it calls the Intents fee switch. This mechanism takes protocol revenue generated from cross-chain intent executions and diverts it into $NEAR buybacks. Revenue generated by the network’s growing activity now creates persistent buy pressure on the token rather than sitting idle in a treasury or flowing to validators alone.

Third, NEAR rolled out a suite of AI-focused products in May 2026. NEAR AI introduced automatic PII anonymization for AI prompts, meaning that when an AI agent processes a user’s request, personally identifiable information gets scrubbed before it ever touches inference infrastructure. Separately, a product called Trezu launched Confidential Treasuries, enabling on-chain entities to manage funds with privacy guarantees. The protocol also partnered with Venice and Brave to enhance its privacy tooling.

Each of these announcements triggered sharp multi-day rallies, with individual surges ranging from 28% to 50%.

The AI agent thesis

NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin has characterized the protocol as fundamental infrastructure for handling AI-driven commerce and execution. The official messaging leans heavily into branding $NEAR as the “currency of agents” and the network as a “unified commerce layer.”

The cross-chain intent execution piece is worth unpacking. Rather than requiring AI agents to hold tokens on specific chains or navigate individual bridge protocols, NEAR’s intent system lets agents express what they want to accomplish, and solvers figure out the optimal path across chains. For an AI agent that needs to buy compute on one chain, settle a payment on another, and store data on a third, that kind of abstraction matters.

What’s coming next and what investors should watch

The next major catalyst is the v2.13 upgrade, scheduled for June 2026. This release introduces two significant technical capabilities: dynamic resharding and post-quantum cryptographic signing.

Dynamic resharding means the network can automatically add or remove shards based on demand, rather than operating with a fixed shard count. Post-quantum cryptography is a forward-looking security measure designed to protect against the theoretical threat of quantum computers breaking current encryption standards.

The tokenomics have genuinely improved: halved inflation plus active buybacks via the Intents fee switch create a structurally different supply-demand dynamic than what existed a year ago.

The most telling metric to watch over the next quarter won’t be price. It will be the number of active AI agents actually transacting on NEAR’s infrastructure and whether the Intents fee mechanism generates enough volume to make buybacks meaningful at scale rather than symbolic.

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