NEAR Protocol
NEAR was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, originally as Near.ai, an AI program-synthesis startup, before pivoting in 2018 to build NEAR Protocol, a sharded Layer-1 blockchain whose mainnet launched in October 2020.
About
NEAR was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, originally as Near.ai, an AI program-synthesis startup, before pivoting in 2018 to build NEAR Protocol, a sharded Layer-1 blockchain whose mainnet launched in October 2020. The ecosystem is stewarded by the non-profit NEAR Foundation in Zug, Switzerland, alongside NEAR AI, an independently run AI company pursuing 'User-Owned AI' — private inference on trusted execution environments (NEAR AI Cloud) and verifiable AI agents.
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