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Future and Past

Where NEAR is headed next—and how its origin in AI shaped a protocol built to scale.

Technical Roadmap

Explore upcoming features, expansions, and improvements that drive AI-focused innovation on NEAR.

Blockchain

  • Chain Signatures TEE support
  • Chain Signatures EdDSA support (SOL, TON, etc.)
  • Omnitoken Launch
  • 600ms blocktimes with 1s finality
  • Sharded Smart Contracts / Dynamic Resharding enabled
  • Reading Data from Other Chains (i.e. the same security for reads as for writes)

Chain Abstraction + NEAR Intents

  • Omnibridge migration
  • Launch of Unified Liquidity Layer
  • More Tier 1 distribution channels
  • Solver bus migration to order book
  • Permissionless listings with Omnibridge

History of NEAR

Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR Protocol in 2018 with the goal of building a scalable, usable blockchain.

AI at the Origin

Before founding NEAR Protocol, Illia and Alex first founded NEAR AI in 2017 as a startup to teach machines to code. Illia had been a machine learning researcher at Google and co-authored "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that launched the transformer architecture powering today's popular LLMs.

Scaling Meets Friction

To train the models that would power NEAR AI, they engaged a global network of computer science students to write code snippets and documentation. However, paying contributors across borders revealed a major problem: global payments were broken. Traditional systems like PayPal and Wise didn’t work reliably in countries like China or Ukraine, and blockchain payments were too expensive due to high gas fees—even then.

Built for Scale

This real-world friction led them to explore building a more scalable and accessible blockchain infrastructure. Coming from backgrounds in large-scale distributed systems, they recognized a critical flaw: existing blockchains couldn’t scale beyond a single machine's capacity.

The vision for NEAR Protocol was to solve three core problems:

  1. Scalability: Build a blockchain that could support a billion users without spiking fees.
  2. Usability: Make onboarding and interaction intuitive, especially for users unfamiliar with crypto.
  3. Developer Experience: Enable developers to use familiar programming languages like JavaScript and Rust.

Sharding Begins

NEAR launched with Nightshade sharding, a design that allows the network to scale linearly by distributing workload across multiple parallel shards. It also introduced innovations like account abstraction, human-readable accounts, and progressive security to simplify both user and developer interactions.

NEAR is the Blockchain for AI

What began as an AI startup evolved into one of the most technically advanced blockchains, built for mass adoption—by both humans and machines. Today, that original focus on AI has come full circle, as NEAR positions itself as the infrastructure layer for AI agents and autonomous systems that require scalable, secure, and permissionless execution.

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