The Near Protocol announced via a blog post on Thursday that it had launched Shade Agents: multichain AI-powered smart contracts that are fully verified onchain and designed to eliminate single points of failure.
Using NEAR’s Chain Signatures for decentralized key management, Shade Agents leverage worker agents running in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to securely access off-chain data and execute decisions using advanced AI models.
Near Protocol explained that Shade Agents can sign transactions on every chain, custody and trade any crypto asset, access off-chain LLMs, APIs, data, computation, and storage, enable a decentralized group of worker agents to collectively control the same key via Chain Signatures, and preserve privacy.
For developers, Shade Agents introduce intelligence to applications and protocols without requiring human intervention. For end users, Shade Agents provide verifiable and private automation, without needing to review every agent transaction or delegate keys to a third party.
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 $3.424, up 8% in the last 24 hours.