Near Protocol (NEAR)

Market is looking increasingly worse and logging off seems increasingly better of a decision I've felt that time passes 5x slower when you're looking at markets nuke and that causes bad decisions The feeling of endlessness is painful, much better to close the charts and relax

I've followed @NEARProtocol more closely than any other L1 over the past two years. I've spoken with Illia on several occasions. Most people miss this: it didn't start as a blockchain. It started as an AI company. The inability to pay globally distributed developers forced its founders to build the protocol. Blockchain was the means. It was always about building toward the inevitable. The agentic era. What's striking now is watching those deliberate design decisions — made from the outset — click into place. NEAR didn't pivot to AI. It was AI first. And as we know, the best tech doesn't always win in crypto. Product-market fit does. Next week on @RealVision, @ilblackdragon returns, joined by @sal_ternullo from @SVRN.

Re bidding $NEAR with @DietaFlex at 2.437-2.38. Inval is 2 H1 candle closure below 2.28 https://t.co/r66HVwqpfI

Most crypto x AI takes are too small. The real shift is from humans operating businesses through spreadsheets, dashboards, and SaaS to AI becoming the interface for computing and business. But AI needs more than payments. It need identity, discovery, reputation, dispute resolution, escrow, insurance, forwards, and markets for work. NEAR Intents are not just better crypto routing. It's the transaction layer for agentic business.

"Near, Zcash, Hyperliquid, Venice pushing yearly highs. Macro struggling." "The AI bottleneck trade is live and this isn't alt season. It's coin-picking season." @robbieklages and @andyyy on the most selective market structure they've ever seen and the framework for navigating it: "New paradigm. Macro and majors struggling. A very select cohort doing very well. That's the AI bottleneck trade." The stars/dogs framework Arthur Hayes articulated on the show applies directly.

June 4th. 9AM-6PM ET. Stamford, CT. The Rollup is heading to CT Digital Forum's Digital FutureFest. A full day on AI, stablecoins, robotics, and cyber with the people running institutional capital. Powered by @NEARProtocol. See you there. https://t.co/TO3GMbRcdq

I almost buried this interview. Back in February, I sat down with @ilblackdragon the Founder of $NEAR. The quality wasn’t perfect. I was traveling. The window to film it was tiny. So I never released it. But the conversation never left my mind. We talked about AI, crypto, capitalism, sovereignty, agents, privacy, robotics, and what happens when software stops being software and becomes intelligence. This was the first time I really understood why blockchain may not just be “finance infrastructure”… It may be the only thing that stops AI from becoming owned by a few centralized gods. User-owned AI. Private agents. Sovereign data. A post-SaaS world. A post-AGI society. This conversation changed my entire worldview. Releasing it now. Hope you enjoy.