In an attempt to accelerate the development of AI agents in integration with Blockchain tech, NEAR Foundation (NF), the Switzerland-based non-profit organization that supports NEAR protocol and its ecosystem, announced on 6 Feb a $20M liquid fund – the NEAR AI Agent Fund.
Deeming that the AI agents are the future of crypto and AI, the fund will support agent tokens for novel decentralised AI-driven use cases. The announcement of the fund comes only a week after it announced the expansion of its NEAR protocol agent.
In a X post, Lark Davis, well-known New Zealand-based entrepreneur and Bitcoin investor shared his opinion on the announcement of NF Fund arguing that “the sheer amount of money flooding into the AI agent space is insane. This sector will bounce back hard IMO.”
The fund, as mentioned in the official blog announcement by Near, is set to be used for development of onchain agentic design that goes beyond the basic social poster agents. It is also seeking to work with ecosystems like Sky, Fraz – for development of AI agents with novel use cases build for mass market consumer solutions. The kind of projects that it will support include agent tokenisation, agent-curated order flow, fully on-chain gaming with AI characters, permissionless AI oracles, agent curated savings accounts, financial entertainment, market maker agents, and social onboarding.
Development of AI agents on NEAR protcol
The AI agents to be developed on layer-1 blockchain of NEAR Protocol, will be provided technical, financial and strategic guidance for the developers . Helping the decentralized applications (dApps) to become intelligent, efficient and user-friendly, AI agents can potentially tap the complete potential of the growing Blockchain technology and AI. Near Protocol’s unique sharding mechanism called Nightsade, coupled with its support for Rust and AssemblyScript make its an ideal platform for developers to build scalable and efficient AI agents.
The developers building AI agents on Near Protocol will receive support from off-chain and cross-chain commitments with NEAR Intents., Chain Signatures, and Trusted Execution Environments for developers to run their agents securely.
Growing AI Agent Market
As the emerging traction, the industry has been witnessing great highs for the development of projects centred around the intersection of AI and crypto. The integration of AI agents in various applications such as Trading and Market Analysis, Decentralized AI and Smart Contracts, Web3 customer support, have been recently fueling a great amount of money in it. Various projects at the intersection of AI*Crypto have emerged, with notable once being:
- Autonolas (Olas) – AI-powered autonomous agents for Web3 applications.
- Fetch.ai – AI-driven DeFi and data-sharing platform.
- Numerai – AI-powered hedge fund leveraging machine learning models.
- SingularityNET – AI marketplace built on blockchain.
- Arweave AO – AI-powered decentralized computing for Web3.
Various other new platforms have emerged too such as, Kima introducing an AI agent to manage cross-chain liquidities; Propichain and Fraktion using them to revolutionize real estate market, auguring that this market is poised for further growth. As of early 2025 only, the combined market cap of AI Agent market stands at $9.74 billion – highlighting the huge space that it has already secured.
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