NEAR Protocol annual progress overview and big ideas for 2025

Author: Stacy Muur , crypto KOL

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

2024 is going to be an excellent year for NEAR Protocol, both from a fundamental and sentiment perspective.

NEAR currently owns:

• Monthly active accounts were 44 million, up from 7 million a year ago
• Daily transaction volume exceeds 8 million, double the level at the beginning of the year (average fee is $0.002)

NEAR also has the 4 apps with the largest number of monthly active users in all of Web3:

• KAIKAI: 31.7 million monthly active users
• Here Wallet: 4.2 million monthly active users
• Sweat Еconomy: 1.6 million monthly active users
• Playember: 500,000 monthly active users

In addition, US$700 million worth of stablecoins flowed into the NEAR ecosystem, a 20-fold increase year-on-year.

In May, NEAR's native stablecoin issuance hit a record high, reaching $760 million; at the same time, DeFi TVL increased fivefold, from $88 million to $430 million.

NEAR Protocol introduces several important upgrades and releases:

Nightshade 2.0: NEAR currently runs 6 active shards, has increased capacity by 50% since the beginning of the year, and plans to expand to 8 shards in the first quarter of this year.

Accelerator program: The foundation has successfully launched three accelerator programs, two of which focus on AI and one on Chain Abstraction. The teams have raised a total of $50.5 million in funding.

NEAR is now fully compatible with MetaMask, Phantom and other ETH wallets.

Chain Signatures were launched on the NEAR mainnet, enabling smart contracts to sign any blockchain transaction. This solidifies NEAR's position in the field of Chain Abstraction.

Intents are launched on NEAR as a new transaction type that allows the exchange of information, requests, assets, and operations between AI agents, services, and end users.

In May, the NEAR Foundation announced that it would focus on user-owned AI.

In November, NEAR launched NEAR AI, a research center that publicly develops 1.4 trillion parameter models. The center houses a user-owned AI assistant capable of acting on behalf of the user in Web2 and Web3 by connecting with other AI agents and services.

(Related reading: Detailed explanation of NEAR AI: Shaping the strongest open source AI platform owned by users )

The NEAR AI ecosystem currently has more than 50 AI teams specializing in research, infrastructure, data and storage, models and applications.

“AI is NEAR” is gaining momentum:

• Eliza is using NEAR intent to perform multi-chain swaps on ai16z
• NEAR AI and Frax Finance are collaborating to build fully autonomous agents leveraging NEAR infrastructure
• Sweat Еconomy is integrating an AI assistant into their wallet UI

In 2025, NEAR may focus on AI, which may earn NEAR Protocol the title of "AI blockchain."

Related reading: Interpretation of NEAR: Compliance with hot narratives, or market leader?