NEAR Protocol

NEAR is the native coin of NEAR, a smart contract blockchain for apps and AI agents.

NEAR Protocol is a layer-1 blockchain where developers run smart contracts (programs on the chain), and NEAR is its native coin. The current mainnet chain started on 21 July 2020 with a supply of 1 billion NEAR, split between community programmes, early backers, the core team and the NEAR Foundation, the non-profit that supports the ecosystem and manages the protocol treasury. All of these original allocations have finished unlocking.

NEAR has no supply cap. New coins are created every epoch (a period of several hours) and paid mostly to validators, the computers that confirm transactions, and to the people who stake NEAR with them. In October 2025 validators adopted a software upgrade that halved maximum inflation from 5% to 2.5% a year. About 90% of new NEAR goes to validators and their stakers and about 10% to a protocol treasury managed by the NEAR Foundation. Total supply was about 1.31 billion NEAR on 27 September 2026, and about 41% of it was staked with 417 active validators.

NEAR is used to pay transaction fees, to lock up space for data stored on the chain (storage staking), to stake with validators and to vote in the House of Stake governance system. 70% of every fee is burned and 30% goes to the contract that was called; a proposed upgrade (protocol version 87, so far only a testnet release candidate) would end that 30% contract reward. Fees are small, so issuance is far larger than the amount burned.

NEAR now presents itself as a platform for 'chain abstraction' (using many blockchains without dealing with each one) and for AI. NEAR Intents lets users swap assets across more than 35 blockchains from one account, and NEAR reports $19 billion of volume through it. NEAR AI offers private AI inference inside secure hardware, used by apps such as Brave and Venice AI. On 29 September 2026 a US spot NEAR fund, the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR), began trading on NYSE Arca; it plans to stake all of its NEAR.