Why NEAR Protocol Could Be the Real Winner of the AI Blockchain Race

Today, Crypto Eri and I interviewed Alex Shevchenko of NEAR Protocol, and it left me with a strong conviction: NEAR isn’t just another blockchain project, it’s one of the most underappreciated powerhouses in the entire crypto ecosystem.

If you’ve been following market trends, you know that AI-related blockchains have been the best-performing class in crypto. That trend isn’t slowing down: it’s accelerating as we move toward 2026. But there’s a critical distinction most investors miss: most blockchains are pretending to do AI, while NEAR was built from AI roots.

NEAR Started as an AI Company

Before it was a blockchain, NEAR was an AI research company. The team was working on machine learning models that needed to make and settle payments autonomously and the blockchain solutions available at the time simply couldn’t handle it.

So, they did something few others have: They built their own blockchain, one that could handle high throughput, real scalability, and the complex logic that intelligent agents require.

That origin story matters, because NEAR wasn’t a “me too” project jumping on a trend. It was born from necessity, AI came first, blockchain came second.

NEAR’s Bigger Vision: An Operating System for the Blockchain World

NEAR isn’t just competing to be the fastest Layer 1 (though it happens to be one of the fastest and most efficient in the world). The real play is bigger:

NEAR is building an operating system layer that sits on top of other blockchains, connecting them through a unified interface of intents and AI agents.

Think of NEAR as the connective tissue between ecosystems. It’s where the complexity of DeFi, cross-chain transactions, and smart contract interactions get abstracted away and replaced with simple, human-like instructions.

Intents: Simplicity Meets Intelligence

Here’s where it gets powerful.In the traditional crypto world, performing a complex task, like swapping tokens across multiple chains, bridging liquidity, or executing a yield strategy, requires dozens of steps across different wallets and dApps.

Intents change that.

With intents, users (or AI agents acting on their behalf) can simply state the goal : like:

“Swap my XRP for ETH and stake it for the best yield available.”

Instead of manually signing each step, the network figures out the optimal path: across chains, bridges, and protocols and executes it safely.

This shift turns blockchain interaction from a series of instructions into a single objective.

It’s a leap similar to what we saw in computing when command lines evolved into graphical user interfaces. NEAR’s intent system is the UI layer for Web3.

Why This Matters for the Future

As trillions of AI agents come online, they’ll need to transact, coordinate, and settle value, not in minutes or hours, but in microseconds. They’ll also need to navigate multiple ecosystems (Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, XRPL, etc.) without human intervention.

That’s what NEAR is preparing for.

This isn’t just another Layer 1 story, it’s the foundation for an intelligent, interoperable economy.

Final Thoughts

While others talk about AI to pump token prices, NEAR is quietly building the infrastructure that AI will actually use. It's an AI-native blockchain, with a vision that goes beyond speed or fees: it’s about usability, interoperability, and intelligent automation.

When the market catches on to that, NEAR’s valuation could look wildly different from where it is today.

Stay tuned, the full interview with Alex Shevchenko will be released soon on the 3 Big Waves Podcast. Follow us on X at https://x.com/3BigWavesMedia

– Jungle Inc

We break the future before it breaks the news.