NEAR Launches Near.com super app, touting AI capabilities and confidential transactions

San Francisco, CA – $NEAR is launching Close to.com, a brand new crypto pockets and shopper app that goals to make blockchain know-how really feel so simple as utilizing a standard finance app, whereas positioning itself on the intersection of crypto and synthetic intelligence (AI).

Polosukhin beforehand co-authored the paper that launched the transformer mannequin, the structure underpinning fashionable AI methods like ChatGPT and plenty of different massive language fashions, and has more and more targeted on how blockchain infrastructure can help the following wave of AI-driven purposes.

“We’re coming into the world the place AI is turning into our interface to compute,” Polosukhin stated throughout the presentation.

$NEAR token is down almost 3% over the past 24 hours.

At its core, Close to.com is designed to take away a lot of the friction that has lengthy made crypto complicated for on a regular basis customers. As a substitute of worrying about fuel charges, non-public keys or switching between totally different blockchains, customers can handle their belongings in a single place.

“You don’t want to consider blockchains. You don’t want to consider fuel, keys,” Polosukhin stated. “You simply use it as your essential pockets.”

Close to.com helps a variety of digital belongings, together with bitcoin, stablecoins, NFTs and different tokens. The concept is to convey collectively exercise that’s sometimes unfold throughout a number of wallets and networks right into a single, streamlined interface.

However $NEAR’s ambitions lengthen past constructing simply one other pockets. The corporate is betting that the following huge wave in crypto will come from its convergence with AI.

As AI brokers turn into extra succesful, like reserving journey, managing emails or dealing with on-line purchases, they are going to more and more want the flexibility to transact. That’s the place crypto infrastructure is available in. Blockchains can present programmable funds, international transfers and automatic settlement with out counting on conventional intermediaries.

Polosukhin argued that as AI methods start interacting with one another, they successfully turn into “financial actors,” software program packages that negotiate, pay and coordinate duties. In that world, crypto turns into the monetary layer that permits these brokers to function.

Close to.com is designed to function that layer, appearing as each a user-friendly pockets for folks and an financial backend for AI-driven exercise.

A key a part of the announcement is privateness. One among blockchain’s longstanding tradeoffs is transparency: transactions are sometimes seen to anybody. Whereas that openness can construct belief, it may well additionally expose delicate monetary info.

“All the pieces you do onchain is clear,” Polosukhin stated. “That’s not life like for standard use circumstances, for day-to-day utilization.”

To deal with this, $NEAR launched a “confidential mode” inside Close to.com. The function permits balances, transfers and buying and selling exercise to stay non-public inside the community’s safety framework. The corporate says this makes the pockets extra sensible not just for people and companies, but in addition for AI brokers which will have to transact with out revealing technique or delicate knowledge.

The launch indicators a broader shift for $NEAR.

“We have now the stack. We have now all of the parts. We have now the product,” Polosukhin stated. “Now we’re switching … to how we truly scale adoption — how we convey this to billions of individuals all over the world.”

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