The Near Protocol announced via X on Wednesday that it has launched NEAR AI, an R&D lab led by the founders of NEAR Protocol. Furthermore, the NEAR Foundation has launched an AI-focused incubator and investment wing focusing on AI projects.
The NEAR Foundation will invest in making NEAR the best ecosystem for the next generation of AI research and applications. This will include core infrastructure investment: enabling data collection and crowdsourcing; curation and rewarding creators; access to compute and novel ways to monetize it; verifiability of training and inference to ensure provenance; agentic infrastructure, and more.
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. The network runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Nightshade, which aims to provide dynamic scalability and stabilize fees.NEAR is trading at $7.841, down by 3% in the last 24 hours.