NEAR Launches $20M AI Agent Fund to Revolutionize Blockchain

The NEAR Foundation, a Switzerland-based non-profit organization supporting the NEAR protocol and its ecosystem, has announced the establishment of a $20 million liquid fund, the NEAR AI Agent Fund. The fund aims to accelerate the development of AI agents integrated with blockchain technology, with a focus on novel use cases for agent tokens.

The fund, as outlined in the official blog announcement, will support the development of on-chain agentic design that goes beyond basic social poster agents. It seeks to collaborate with ecosystems like Sky and Fraz to develop AI agents with innovative use cases. The types of projects it will support include agent tokenization, agent-curated order flow, fully on-chain gaming with AI characters, permissionless AI oracles, agent-curated savings accounts, financial entertainment, market maker agents, and social onboarding.

The AI agents developed on the layer-1 blockchain of the NEAR Protocol will provide technical, financial, and strategic guidance to developers. This will help decentralized applications (dApps) become more intelligent, efficient, and user-friendly, potentially unlocking the full potential of blockchain technology and AI. The NEAR Protocol's unique sharding mechanism, Nightshade, coupled with its support for Rust and AssemblyScript, makes it an ideal platform for building scalable and efficient AI agents.

The AI Agent Fund is dedicated to investing in decentralized AI use cases and mass-market consumer solutions. The fund's mission is to foster the growth and development of AI agents in the NEAR ecosystem and beyond.

The AI agent market has been gaining significant traction, with projects centered around the intersection of AI and crypto experiencing substantial growth. The integration of AI agents in various applications, such as trading and market analysis, decentralized AI and smart contracts, and Web3 customer support, has attracted significant investment. Notable projects in this space include Autonolas, Fetch.ai, Numerai, SingularityNET, and Arweave AO. As of early 2025, the combined market cap of the AI Agent market stands at $9.74 billion, highlighting the substantial space it has already secured.