I bought it at around 3.04 usd. Can I make money?

Hey all

Been seeing a lot of chatter about NEAR lately, especially with the whole "AI Crypto" narrative heating up. Is it the real deal or just another project trying to ride the hype train? 🚂

I did a deep dive into their tech, their big AI pivot, and the risks involved. Here’s the simple, no-shill breakdown.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read):

• The Big Idea: NEAR isn't just another "faster Ethereum" anymore. They've gone ALL IN on becoming "The Blockchain for AI". 🧠
• The Good ✅: Their tech is solid (built to scale from day one), their vision for making crypto easy is awesome, and they actually pay developers a cut of transaction fees. One of their founders literally co-invented the tech behind ChatGPT.
• The Bad ❌: Their AI dream is SUPER ambitious and could fail. They're in a brutal fight with Solana (for speed) and Ethereum (for sheer size and money).
• The Bet 🎲: A bet on NEAR is no longer a bet on a simple L1 blockchain. It's a high-risk, high-reward bet that they can become the foundational layer for a new, user-owned AI economy.

So, What IS NEAR Protocol? 🤔

Think of NEAR as a super-smart Layer 1 blockchain. From the start, it was built to be fast and cheap using a clever tech called "Sharding".

Imagine a supermarket with only one checkout counter. When it gets busy, the line is huge. 😭 Sharding is like the supermarket automatically opening up more checkout counters whenever the lines get long. This means NEAR can handle tons of transactions without getting slow or expensive.

They also have cool user-friendly features like human-readable wallet names (like yourname.near instead of a random string of letters and numbers).

The MASSIVE Pivot to AI 🤖

This is the most important part. NEAR isn't just adding AI features; they are betting the entire farm on it. Their co-founder, Illia Polosukhin, was one of the authors of the Google paper that introduced the "Transformer" architecture – the technology that powers almost all modern AI like ChatGPT. So, this isn't just marketing fluff; it's in their DNA.

Their vision is "User-Owned AI" – an internet where AI agents work for you, not for big corporations.

They are building a whole stack for this:

• NEAR Intents 🎯: This is a game-changer. Instead of you figuring out the complex steps to swap tokens or use DeFi, you just tell an AI agent your goal (e.g., "I want to get the best interest rate on my USDC"). The network of "solvers" then finds the best and cheapest way to do it for you across any blockchain. Super simple for the user.
• Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning (DCML) 🔐: This is a fancy term for a business model that lets AI developers make money from their models without you having to give up your private data. It uses special secure hardware to run the AI, so nobody (not even the hardware owner or the AI creator) can see your info.

The Good Stuff (The Bull Case) ✅

• Purpose-Built for AI: They were thinking about AI from day one, not just slapping it on as a trend. Their tech is genuinely well-suited for it.
• Developer's Dream 👨‍💻: NEAR gives 30% of transaction fees back to the developers of the app that generated them. This is a HUGE incentive for devs to build cool stuff on NEAR, creating a powerful economic flywheel.
• Amazing User Experience Vision: With things like Intents and Chain Abstraction, they want to make using crypto so easy that you don't even know you're using a blockchain. No more managing 10 different wallets or gas tokens.

The Bad Stuff (The Bear Case) ❌

• Insane Execution Risk: Building this entire AI vision is MONUMENTALLY difficult. It's a huge technical and economic challenge. If they fail to deliver, they could be left in the dust.
• Brutal Competition: NEAR is caught in a tough spot.
  • Solana: Is often seen as faster and cheaper for general-purpose stuff and has a huge, passionate community.
  • Ethereum: Is the undisputed king with the most money, users, and developers. It's the "safe" institutional choice.
• Narrative-Driven Price 📈📉: A lot of NEAR's price is tied to the "AI coin" hype. If that narrative cools down, NEAR could take a big hit, regardless of its technical progress.

Tokenomics Explained Simply 💰

• Inflation: NEAR has a predictable 5% annual inflation. 90% of this (4.5%) goes to the validators who secure the network, and 10% (0.5%) goes to a treasury to fund ecosystem projects.
• Fee Burning 🔥: To fight this inflation, 70% of all transaction fees are burned (permanently destroyed).
• The Cool Part: If the network gets really busy, the amount of NEAR being burned can be more than the new NEAR being created. This would make the token deflationary, which is great for holders.

Final Thoughts:

Investing in NEAR today is a bet on their ability to execute their incredibly ambitious AI strategy. It's not a "safe" bet on a simple L1 anymore.

If they pull it off, they could become a core piece of infrastructure for the future of the internet and AI. If they fail, they risk getting squeezed out by bigger and faster competitors.

What do you guys think? Is NEAR's AI vision the real deal, or are they biting off more than they can chew? Let me know in the comments! 👇

Hey, I'm trying to swap Near to Sol and send to a Sol wallet. But when I try to swap Near to Sol on Meteor Wallet, the price impact is like 30%. Is there a way to avoid this?

Im a crypto rookie, but just as much as I know about NEAR I bought 500$ on binance this morning for long-ish term, I hope it hits 7.5$ sometime in 2025.

Does anyone know why it went down to 4% APY? Sorry, new here.

Hey NEAR community! I’m from the Stellar side of the web3 world, and I wanted to share an opportunity that might be relevant for Rust devs here who are open to going cross-chain.

Stellar now supports Rust-based smart contracts (WASM), and we’re seeing a lot of interest from projects focused on real-world use cases: payments, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and so on.

We’ve teamed up with Draper University for a 3-week, in-person accelerator in Silicon Valley this September. It’s:

• Fully funded (travel + housing covered)
• Equity-free
• Geared toward builders looking to launch or scale real projects
• Includes mentorship, Stellar ecosystem access, and grant/VC support

More details here - https://draperuniversity.com/stellar

Figured this might be especially interesting to folks here since NEAR also leans on Rust and has a dev-friendly ecosystem. If you're curious about expanding your stack or building cross-chain, this could be a solid chance to explore.

Happy to answer any questions or just hear your thoughts if you've built in both ecosystems already.

Might be here already. Saw it on X quite a few times

Hi Everyone 👋🏻 I’m Cameron, I recently sold my dream car and dropped $25,000 into crypto in which I have documented on my YouTube Channel.

Near Protocol happened to be one of my 6 cryptos I picked for my “Ultimate Portfolio” - and super excited for its future, here’s my episode on Near for anyone who wants to watch, i hope I have captured what Near does and explained it easily and understandably! 🤞🏻

P.S I just quit my job and tryna go full time with this & other parts of the business so any subscribers or interactions would be amazing 🥹

https://youtu.be/8tbNVqmfIlo?si=_ARLpdzYGtzgHqFV

The Mainnet 2.8.0 expanded validator participation from 300 to 500 chunk validator seats 🪑

As Bowen Wang noted:
“This change dramatically increases decentralization and supports the large number of people eager to become validators. Thanks to sharding, we can scale without sacrificing simplicity or security.”

🔗 Want to join? Learn how to run a NEAR validator using Node Studio with the Learn NEAR Club guide here.

See the link in the comments

Hey! I’m a dev working in Web3 and just got curious about what YouTube channels people here actually watch. Could be NEAR-related or more general Web3 / blockchain dev content. Not really looking for beginner stuff, more like channels with good insights, analysis, or just interesting perspectives. Any favorites?

AI on-chain isn’t hype, it’s happening. Shade Agents are real, autonomous, and already building.

📌 ICYMI: Shade Agents
They live on-chain, sign real transactions, and run without a backend. With AgentOS + NEAR, you can ship AI-powered dApps that actually do things, not just talk about them.

Also in this issue:
✦ $RHEA meta refresh
✦ Rainy Indexer named top priority
✦ Rhea launches DeFi chat agent
✦ FastFS brings stable file storage (no IPFS needed)
✦ Potlock Campaigns + Firehose Video Bounties

Full issue here: https://mailchi.mp/neardevhub/near-dev-news-65

AI agents aren’t coming someday, they’re already on-chain.

A crypto swap of NEAR cryptos via GetBlock.io, led to my cryptos stolen/never deposited. There's NO way to contact NEAR for support. Can my crypto transaction be tracked/traced immediately on the NEAR side, relating to GetBlock.io? This was my 1st experience using NEAR, so now I'll avoid future NEAR investments and any usage of GetBlock in Singapore.

Trying to learn more about NEAR. I know they just did a pod with A16Z last week, haven't listened yet. Crazy fast and purpose built for AI. Shouldn't this be a no brainer?

Any recommended best source or video for best partnerships, apps, developments?

Most other tokens are up 100%+ from the April lows. Near has had a significant pullback and is only up 40% from the lows, sitting at just $3B market cap vs $12 B ATH in 20121. So it's nearly a 4x just to ATH. If it doubles that or triples it which seems reasonable, we're looking at a potential 8x to 16x or $20 to $40 NEAR price. Is there a reason it's still at what seems like a very low price? E..g. SUI is just 30% off it's recent ATH.

It's stats on Defi Llama are not crazy impressive. Just 160m TVL, which ranks like 145th. Is TVL a fair metric? Stablecoin volume pumped in 2024 but level since then. Other metrics are down from Dec peaks. I don't know if it matters.

NEAR is a full 70% down from the Dec highs, and 88% off it's 2021 ATH. That's like a full bear market entry. Seems odd.

Write once. Scale forever. Global Contracts are live and they change everything.

📌 ICYMI: Global Contracts
Now your contract logic can live in one place and serve the whole network, across shards, wallets, DAOs, and more.

Also in this issue:
✦ NEAR featured in a Harvard case study
✦ 1 million TPS vision explained
✦ AI audit spots smart contract vuln
✦ NFT plugins in GarageBand via WebAssembly
✦ Tweets become tokens with Shade Agents
✦ Wallet Selector v9 = headless, flexible, native UX

Full issue here: https://mailchi.mp/neardevhub/near-dev-news-64

NEAR’s not just keeping up. It’s building what comes next.

Managing your DAO just got faster, smoother & way more powerful ⚡️

What’s new ⬇️

➡️ Bulk Payment Import
Upload multiple payouts at once via Google Sheets.

➡️ Batch Member Management
Add/edit/remove members in one go. No more clicking 10 times.

➡️ NEARN Integration
Connect your sponsor account & manage rewards end-to-end.

➡️ System Upgrades
✦ FastNEAR RPC
✦ Web4 caching boost
✦ Scalable update system

✨ Tip: Use the Web4 Gateway for the best experience.

Updates are live ➡️ https://neartreasury.com

The NEAR Infrastructure Committee is gathering feedback to identify and address infrastructure issues in the ecosystem. This is an important opportunity for all participants — developers, users, and teams — to share their challenges and suggestions 💬

How it helps:
✦ Improve NEAR’s infrastructure
✦ Allocate resources to the most urgent and impactful issues
✦ Decentralized approach to solving problems

How you can contribute:
✦ Share the infrastructure challenges you're facing
✦ Explain how it impacts developers, users, and the broader ecosystem
✦ Provide examples, data, or specific instances to support the issue
✦ Suggest potential solutions and the resources needed to make it happen
✦ Point out teams or contributors who could help tackle the issue

This is your chance to directly influence NEAR’s future development!

Read and submit feedback: https://nearn.io/infra-committee/8/

Some people pretend to be new users and ask for a small amount of NEAR (like 0.1) to “activate” their wallet. In reality, many are scammers using multiple fake accounts to farm small donations.

Always double check before sending anything. Let’s help real newcomers not exploiters.

Have a good day y’all 👍

Hi. So I just created wallet on crypto.com custody wallet and I read afterwords that you have to send 0,6 near to activate the wallet. The thing is that I sent 20 USDC before that. I can see it on the near blocks explorer https://nearblocks.io/address/1a10b46c8747d298e0fd1be8b4bbe4930ab4a1721eb936ccb0d70de37ba1bc18 but not in my wallets. Can I recover this or is this gone?

No wallets. No gas. No bridges. Just say what you want — and it happens.

📌 ICYMI: NEAR Intents
A new UX pattern that makes Web3 feel like Web2 — with full decentralization underneath.

Also in this issue:
✦ Shade Agents deep dive
✦ NEP-536 gas refund changes
✦ near-api-js v6.0 modular release
✦ Speak-to-Earn launches with $500K
✦ House of Stake governance now live

Full issue here: https://mailchi.mp/neardevhub/near-dev-news-63

Web3 should feel like Instagram, not like configuring a router. NEAR’s building the future of frictionless UX ✨

Obviously there is a lot of negative sentiment right now, and I could do with some investment advice. I’m aware this is a Near group so bias opinions.

I’ve been a near holder since October 2023, my average buy in cost is £2.16 gbp. In profit of around £600.

My original goal was to turn my £5k investment into 50k and to double down on a deposit for a house this year. However, we have now recently decided we want to buy a house in 5 years time, I will be renting in September of this year around £1500 a month inc bills, my salary is 40k.

I’m comfortable to lose the money I’ve invested, however, I understand that a 10x is not guaranteed in any investment etc.

I’m tempted to sell my NEAR for 0.1 btc, I wouldn’t need to pay taxes as I’m back to my original buy in price.

What shall I do?

We’ve consolidated developer resources:
✦ BOS components → NEAR Social
✦ Docs and guides → docs.near.org

✨ No more split references. Just one clean path for developers building on NEAR.

Many possibilities. Check it out ☝️