This summer, NEAR brought its boldest brand campaign into the real world. Fork That was not just a tagline. It was a statement of intent. From the streets of New York to the seaside in Cannes, every touchpoint was crafted to deliver one clear message: if the future you want is not here yet, fork that and build it on NEAR.
Fork That is more than marketing. It is a rallying cry. A creative provocation for builders, founders, and researchers who are tired of default settings and ready to design better systems.
Whether you came across our programming at a conference, opened one of our stunt boxes, or spotted our messaging across menus, booths, and swag, you felt it. This is what it looks like when brand, product, and community are aligned with purpose. We are building open, user-owned AI. And we are not waiting for permission.
NEAR at Permissionless IV
At Permissionless IV in New York, NEAR showed up with a full week of activations designed for every layer of the Web3 ecosystem. From curated investor dinners to high-impact technical programming, each moment pointed back to a single narrative. Fork That.
The week began with an invite-only NEAR x A100x investor dinner, followed by an institutional breakfast with The Tie and a builder-focused founder dinner in partnership with BUIDL. We hosted a NEAR happy hour centered around the campaign, and by midweek, co-hosted the first-ever Open Source AI Summit in NYC. This co-located event brought together researchers, developers, and thought leaders to explore the infrastructure needed for AI that is verifiable, composable, and truly decentralized. The week concluded with a private ecosystem dinner to celebrate the momentum and connections made throughout the conference.
Across all events, NEAR distributed its Fork That stunt boxes to high-signal builders, researchers, and ecosystem partners. These kits were more than merch. They were designed as artifacts — objects that carried the campaign’s ethos and sparked conversation long after the events ended. They were extremely well received, with recipients sharing them across social media and in Telegram chats, helping the message ripple far beyond the event venues.
On stage, NEAR delivered thought leadership across multiple formats. Illia Polosukhin, NEAR’s CEO, opened Akash Accelerate with a keynote on the roadmap to user-owned AI. He later joined the Permissionless mainstage for a panel on the existential need for open-source AI. At the Open Source AI Summit, he broke down the fundamentals in a talk titled The Blockchain for AI, Explained. One of the week’s most talked-about sessions was a debate between Illia and Eigenlayer’s Sreeram Kannan on security models for verifiable machine learning, moderated by Michael Casey. It was a standing-room-only discussion that highlighted NEAR’s leadership in defining the technical and ethical standards for decentralized AI.
NEAR at EthCC Cannes
A few days later, NEAR landed in Cannes for EthCC and brought an entire city with it. The Oz City was a nine-day pop-up builder hub and bootcamp dedicated to agentic systems, coordination primitives, and intent-based infrastructure. It was a space where the future of autonomous agents was not just discussed but built in real time.
Throughout EthCC, NEAR hosted a series of community and ecosystem gatherings. Agents Day brought technical minds together for deep dives into onchain agents. Agents Unleashed took the energy into the cultural sphere, celebrating open infrastructure in a festival setting. The House of Stake salon invited ecosystem delegates and validators into conversation, while our Intent-Powered Happy Hour helped translate abstract protocol ideas into community connection. NEAR also co-hosted Crypto on the Coast with Unit 410 and Pantera, offering a space for high-level conversations on funding, scaling, and AI x blockchain convergence.
Our booth at EthCC was one of the most trafficked in the venue. It served as a hub for product demos, real-time research discussions, and community meetups. Fork That stunt boxes made another appearance and once again became conversation starters among developers, designers, and researchers eager to align with the ethos of building differently.
NEAR also made a significant impact on stage. Illia Polosukhin delivered a keynote on how blockchains can power user-owned AI. He later joined Justin Drake for a head-to-head debate on scaling strategies, comparing sharding and rollups. Lane Rettig joined several key sessions, including a panel on Ethereum’s value chain and a solo talk titled H-AI-L to the Chief. He also joined a panel on incentive alignment through game theory. Proximity Labs’ V delivered a keynote at L2Con titled From DApps to Autonomous Agents, pushing forward the idea that agents, not applications, represent the next frontier in user experience. NEAR AI team members Jay Z and Pierre Le Guen presented at Hack Seasons and Encryption Day respectively, diving deep into the trust, security, and usability layers of open AI infrastructure.
A Campaign with Real Reach
What made Fork That stand out was not just its bold voice but its execution across every layer of the event experience. From custom-branded menus to technical summits, from keynote stages to surprise swag drops, the message was always consistent. And it always made sense. It invited people to question the defaults, to think differently, and to take action.
Attendees left both Permissionless and EthCC with two things etched in memory. First, Fork That is NEAR’s rallying cry for builders who refuse to wait. Second, NEARis the blockchain for AI. It is open, composable, and optimized for the agent-first era.
The last few weeks proved that a great campaign is not just something people see. It is something they carry with them. Fork That was never the end goal. It was the beginning of a movement and that movement is just getting started.
Let’s build.