NEAR’s New Token Utility and AI Economy | Illia Polosukhin

— NEAR AI Cloud offers end-to-end confidential and verifiable AI inference by stripping away system prompts and providing cryptographic proof of model outputs, addressing concerns about hidden filtering by centralized providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.

— Staking NEAR tokens now generates yield that can be converted into inference access, creating a "universal basic AI" utility model where token holders receive proportional compute capacity without recurring subscription fees.

— NEAR's vertically integrated stack—combining blockchain, Confidential Intents, IronClaw agents, and AI Cloud—enables autonomous businesses to run 24/7 with persistent access to intelligence, finance, and on-chain execution without depleting treasury.

— NEAR Intents facilitate a decentralized compute marketplace where GPU providers receive NEAR emissions based on inference volume, and revenue from transaction fees flows back into protocol buybacks and validator rewards.

— Partnerships with Venice, Brave, Bermuda government, and remittance providers demonstrate real-world demand for privacy-preserving AI in financial and governance contexts.

— NEAR positions itself as "AI money" by combining sovereign security (blockchain), verifiable intelligence access (staking), and transaction settlement (Intents) to capture value across AI agent activity.

— If you hold NEAR and want to run autonomous agents or access AI inference regularly, staking NEAR for compute access may be more efficient than paying per-query fees; monitor the revenue dashboard at [revenue.near.org](https://revenue.near.org) to track protocol fee capture and emissions.

— Watch NEAR Intents development as a transparent compute marketplace; if decentralized GPU trading gains liquidity, it could reduce the opacity and risk built into today's cloud compute contracts—a structural advantage over centralized cloud providers.

— Consider NEAR's vertical stack when evaluating long-term token utility: unlike peers, NEAR integrates blockchain settlement, confidential execution, and AI access into a single economy, making the token defensible for agents that need always-on inference and verifiable financial transactions.