NEAR Infrastructure Committee Announces Chain Abstracted Relayer RFP Winners
The NEAR Infrastructure Committee recently published a request for proposals to build a Chain Abstracted Relayer—and is pleased to announce that two teams, Rath and HOT Labs, have been selected, providing builders with multiple options for Chain Abstracted tooling.
The Chain Abstracted Relayer SDK(s) will enable applications, wallets, and users to seamlessly utilize existing infrastructure for meta-transactions, gas stations, and account abstraction services across all supported chains in the Chain Signatures ecosystem.
Challenges the RFP Seeks to Address
Currently, developers face significant challenges when building with Chain Signatures: managing varying gas costs across chains, navigating different protocol standards, and handling complex relayer infrastructures across NEAR, EVM, and Solana networks. While solutions exist on individual chains, there's no unified coordination within the NEAR ecosystem.
To address this, the Infrastructure Committee requested proposals for an easy-to-use, self-service SDK that works with different gas relayers and provides ongoing maintenance as NEAR Chain Signatures expands to more chains. This solution will significantly reduce both operational overhead and learning curves for teams building on Chain Signatures, while leveraging NEAR Intents for gas sponsorships.
The Winners
The two selected teams are Rath, with their Tachyon solution, and HOT Labs, an established multichain wallet with proprietary bridges.
Rath
Rath is the universal rails for DeFi yield, enabling wallets and consumer apps to offer yield on user assets. Through real-time auctions, wallets can enable yield for their users by tapping into the best DeFi protocols across chains.
Tachyon is Rath's ultra-fast, multichain relayer powering cross-chain interactions with <150ms latency and support for 16+ chains. It's used in live production by protocols like Synthetix and Polynomial for high-throughput, mission-critical operations.
HOT Labs
HOT Labs, formed by HERE Wallet and HAPI, develops innovative blockchain products focused on user-centric crypto solutions, primarily the HOT Wallet and HOT Protocol. The HOT Wallet is a non-custodial, multichain wallet integrated into Telegram, supporting blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, NEAR, TON, and TRON. It enables seamless cross-chain swaps and gas payments in a unified currency, serving over 30 million users globally. The HOT Protocol is a decentralized Chain Signature protocol that utilizes Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to enhance security by distributing private keys across validators, offering features like 2FA, replaceable seed phrases, and cross-chain gas relays.
HOT Labs addresses the fragmented gas relayer infrastructure with a comprehensive solution featuring cross-chain gas station abstraction, smart fallback mechanisms, and native NEAR Intents support. Their production-proven infrastructure has handled over 800,000 refuels and includes a HOT Gas Refuel SDK supporting multiple chains (NEAR, Ethereum, Solana, and others), Chain Adapters & Contracts for smart contract integration, and a comprehensive monitoring stack using Prometheus and Grafana for performance tracking.
Why Two Teams?
NEAR Foundation believes in fostering a competitive environment through multiple vendors. While NEAR has a longstanding partnership with HOT Labs, this approach presents an exciting opportunity to bring in Rath as both a new DeFi team and infrastructure provider. NEAR Foundation highly encourages infrastructure support with go-to-market strategy and product readiness from day one of launch.
Other teams submitting proposals include Limechain (previous maintainers of Wallet Selector) and Meteor Wallet (currently maintaining MyNEARWallet and BigQuery). View the full proposals: HOT Labs, Rath, Meteor Wallet, and Lime Chain.
NEAR Infrastructure Committee Updates
The NEAR Infrastructure Committee is dedicated to making all components of the NEAR stack the best for founders and builders. Stay tuned for upcoming updates, including:
- Infrastructure Credit Programs, allowing infrastructure providers to set up subsidies for builders on NEAR (announcement for builders soon)
- FastAuth 2.0 (subject to rename) by Peersyst/NEAR Mobile Wallet Team, which is completing implementation and entering audit phase
- Testing and UX support to help founders ensure product quality
- NEAR Intents token launchpad for multichain liquidity integration
- NEAR Intents NFT launchpad by HOT
- HOT and Lucid Labs’ Wallet Selector Implementation
Finally, the NEAR Infrastructure Committee now accepts grant proposals on a rolling basis through the NEARN.io platform built by Devhub, in addition to specific RFPs. Stay tuned for more projects and opportunities to improve NEAR ecosystem infrastructure.
