📝 Editor’s Note: Setting the Scene

Welcome to OurNetwork's third issue exclusively covering NEAR, the sharded, Layer 1 blockchain.

Since our last issue, NEAR has delved deeper into chain abstraction, use of intents, and the topic on everyone's mind, AI.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

• NEAR One is the key contributor to NEAR protocol, delivering critical features needed by the blockchain's ecosystem. To further support its cross-chain vision focused on intents and AI agents, NEAR One launched a multi-party computation (MPC) network capable of producing at least 200 Chain Signatures per second. Chain Signatures are a feature which allows accounts on NEAR to transparently control assets on other chains, tapping into the liquidity of the whole crypto ecosystem and providing much more efficient outcomes to the users.

• Protocol version 72 released with NEAR Core v2.3.0 in October reduced the storage compute cost which allowed the network to execute more transactions per block. The led to a more than doubled effective increase of maximum transactions per second (TPS) per shard during peak load.

• NEAR Core release 2.5.0 included protocol upgrades 74 and 75, increasing the number of shards from 6 to 8, leading to a 33% capacity increase. Testnet has been successfully upgraded and mainnet will follow suit.

• To engage developers, NEAR employs a weekly livestream which reaches ~15k viewers, both live and on-demand. NEAR also maintains 57 example repositories on Github covering topics like chain abstraction, AI, smart contracts, and frontends. Combined, these provide a comprehensive learning resources for developers.

• NEAR's documentation has ~12k monthly visitors —60k views— while dev.near.org attracts ~30k visitors —over 100k page views— at a 4:50 session duration. Overall, the site averages 28k monthly visitors, 133k page views, and a 23% bounce rate, which well below industry norms.

• NEAR's core tooling spans from create-near-app, which has 500 weekly downloads, to near-api-js , which has had over 100k in weekly downloads, to support developer needs.

• Total cross-chain volume, powered by NEAR Intents, is approaching the $10M mark, with both users and transactions showing an upward trend since late 2024. Infinex, the decentralized exchange (DEX), recently announced the integration of NEAR Intents' self-sovereign Bitcoin vaults.

• nBTC, the first form of Bitcoin natively issued on NEAR, supported by @SatoshiBTC, is now live, with burgeoning activity already onchain. Active senders on the rise – more users are engaging with nBTC, as seen in the increasing sender count.

• Burrow Finance, lending platform which merged with Ref Finance, a DEX, to become a unified DeFi platform called Rhea, had its total supply surge 100x to $200K on Feb. 19, 2025. The dApp enables users to long, hedge, and short across 10+ assets. Rhea also has a total TVL of $44.3M as of Mar 4.

• AIDOLS, the new AI-Agent token deployer, has already facilitated the creation of 278 agents. Cumulated trading volume of launched agents on has hit 338.2K NEAR, worth ~$1.2M at the time of writing, with 6.4k unique traders. 72% of this volume was processed by Rhea, illustrating a great use case of DeFi composability.

• OmniBridge, the solution for cross-chain liquidity, went live on Feb. 14 and has already facilitated 210 transactions for an aggregated ~$30k in bridged volume. Solana dominates with 99.6% of the volume as the ecosystem is deploying community pilots on the chain.

• NEAR AI is a platform for user-owned AI, featuring free inference, open-source AI agents that can interact onchain or on Twitter. The agents are also connected to each other with Agent Interaction & Transaction Protocol (AITP), an open standard for agentic communications. Since its alpha release, NEAR AI has had over 500 agents launch on the platform, including over 200 forks of existing agents.

• The Open Agents Alliance has launched with 14 member organizations, including NEAR AI, Coinbase Onramp & AgentKit, and Eliza Labs. Together they will be offering an open network of AI assistants and agents that are open to all and rewards its builders.
• A world of user-owned AI requires open-source frontier AI models and agents, running in decentralized, encrypted environments — NEAR AI Research has published two papers in just the last week, covering the Proof of Response protocol and decentralized model training.

• NEAR Intents are a new type of transaction that allows information, requests, assets, and actions to be exchanged between AI agents, services, and end users. Users are able to trade in assets in a chain-agnostic way. NEAR Intents has already reached a TVL of $6.3M across 66 tokens on 13 blockchains with 32.3k transactions settled.

• NEAR Intents already supports 60+ assets. The lions share of TVL — about 80% — is accounted for by blue-chips like BTC, ETH and SOL, and stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

• NEAR Intents has seen steady growth since launch. Over the past 30 days it averaged a daily trading volume of ~$50,000 with peaks at $978k on Mar. 3 2025 and $971k on Jan. 20 2025.

• Since October 2024, there have been over 84K transactions calling v1.signer, NEAR’s contract for chain signatures. This feature allows NEAR accounts, including smart contracts, to sign and execute transactions on other blockchains, enabling seamless interoperability across multiple networks.

• The launch of Nearcore 2.4 introduced key optimizations like Epoch Sync and contract caching for state witness. These improvements led to a 90% drop in daily gas usage for chain signatures, making transactions <10 Tera Gas (TGas) per transaction. The changes also improved network throughput and reduced congestion.

• Recent upgrades to NEAR’s Chain Signatures have significantly improved decentralization by reducing reliance on a single node. The latest version, launched in February 2025, resulted in the percentage of transactions attributed to the lead node operator dropped from 40% to below 25%.

• Active Usage Ratio (AUR) is a metric that measures the proportion of a cryptocurrency's total value that is actively being used or locked in various protocols and applications. Ethereum's AUR is at 15.9%, Bitcoin's is at 5.1%, NEAR's at 4.5% while XRP remains at 0.07%, leaving billions unused. High fees, multi-step flows and bridging risks, hinder participation. Nuffle Labs stands to tap into this unused capital by keeping tokens on native chains and issuing alternative tokens for yield. Nuffle does this by using forced inclusion to secure access. One dashboard simplifies use, potentially unlocking vast idle capital and reducing hack risk by 80%.

• Cumulatively, over $2.8B has been lost in bridge attacks to date​. This figure includes major incidents involving Ronin, Wormhole, Poly Network —losing approximately $611M in August 2021 — Binance Smart Chain bridge, losing $570M in October 2022, and many others.