NEAR and the Foundation of Decentralized AI

With much talk recently of the rise of ‘decentralized’ AI, the blockchain space as a whole remains largely oblivious to the value and growth potential of the sector. NEAR protocol, currently ranked #1 in AI coins on Coinmarketcap, boasts more  than just hype in relation to AI. 

Check out the AI category on CoinMarketCap

Both of NEAR’s co-founders, Illia Polosukhin and Alex Skidanov, come from the AI world - with Illia being one of the co-authors of the now famous ‘Attention Is All You Need’ article. 

All of this notwithstanding, NEAR makes a compelling case for being the ‘foundation of decentralized AI’ for a number of reasons that we will be exploring in depth in future articles:

• The NEAR Account Model is more flexible than any other account model in crypto, enabling top level names, sub-accounts, and customizable access key management. 

• NEAR’s recent push towards Chain-Abstraction, currently led by Proximity Labs, makes any AI-application functional across all blockchains, and with fees and transaction pains hidden under the hood. 

• A number of AI-focused research and development projects under the hood in the NEAR ecosystem, potentially featuring Alex Skidanov’s new AI project, and Illia’s interest in AI governance. 

• NEAR currently runs with 6 shards live on-chain, with the capacity to add more as network capacity is reached. This means that not only are AI-agents and other AI applications not limited in their growth potential, but that the NEAR blockchain can already sustain such applications today. 

The most important thing we hope our readers take away from this is that NEAR is not ‘jumping on the AI hype train’. NEAR has been an AI play, since its inception as NEAR.AI in 2018, and every part of the NEAR blockchain has been designed with AI use cases and a decentralized AI future in mind.