NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol)

NEAR is building the infrastructure for AI agents to hire one another. Most agent commerce today is built around fixed services that can be priced per call. Hiring another agent creates a different kind of transaction because the buyer is paying for an outcome that may take several steps to produce. NEAR is building a single stack around the full process. Agent Market turns a task and budget into an open job that agents can bid on. The selected provider executes the work and is paid through escrow. Delivery can run through IronClaw with private inference supplied by NEAR AI Cloud. NEAR Intents supports settlement. Completing the transaction requires one more step: deciding whether the provider delivered what was promised. That becomes difficult when the work requires expertise the requester does not have. With reliable verification, the model NEAR is building could take agentic commerce beyond pay-per-call services and into markets for completed work.

The Privacy Frontier: ZK meets TEE Most privacy panels explain why privacy matters, this one is two builders comparing the opposite bets they made. With @MayaDotan_ (StarkWare) and @AlexAuroraDev (NEAR), moderated by @jessiexiao_eth. Tomorrow, 1:00 PM GMT. Hosted on @Starknet.

BIG NEWS: Your On-chain Bitcoin Payments Are Now More Private! We are constantly yapping about Zcash and Monero lately but those who have been here long enough know that our roots are in Bitcoin! Bitcoin is where it all started for us and we are still privileged to offer you the most comprehensive Bitcoin experience on mobile wallet. Now, meet private Bitcoin transactions! Today, we are partnering with @near_intents and excited to announce support for PRIVATE Bitcoin payments. Private Send will be an optional switch in your send screen. Turn it on whenever you don’t want a payment exposing the rest of your financial life. ⚡ Send BTC without giving the recipient a direct link to your originating wallet UTXOs. ⚡ Send ETH without exposing that wallet’s public balances and transaction history. ⚡ Pay in USDT or USDC without handing the recipient a permanent window into your wallet. Those are just the most common examples. Private Send will work across all assets supported by Unstoppable and @near_intents confidentiality protocols. Remember, it’s not a promise of anonymity but rather something that would keep your activity hidden from the recipient and chain lurker. It’s a privacy upgrade over a normal on-chain payment. Powered by the newly released Confidential Intents infrastructure from NEAR. Huge thanks and hugs to the team at @NEARProtocol for making this integration possible.🫂 The feature to be release by the of the week in version 0.51 Be Private! Be Unstoppable!

Illia on the two types of post quantum cryptography, and which one Near prefers "There's a difference between types of cryptography, so-called lattice based and hash based, and there's a bit of a debate right now in the Web3 space about what should be used, with different tradeoffs" "People are used to signing with their wallet, the traditional way, but if we go to more institutional adoption, people use multi party computation, MPC. That's also what backs Near Intents and a lot of the cross chain work Near is doing. Today we have an announcement that we have a consortium testing multi party computation across custodians, banks and regulators, to showcase how this is going to work in production for real institutional use cases" "This is where we need the social consensus for the whole of Web3 to work together in a reasonable way, because hash based is actually very hard to support with hardware wallets and MPC solutions. So it's important for us that there's consensus on lattice based" "We want to be ahead of the curve and showcase how all of these tools work, and bring it to both individual users and institutional usage. That enables both security and trust in blockchain, which we've seen plummet a bit since post quantum concerns started coming out late last year"

The beauty of @near_intents is it focusses on satisfying the INTENT of the user – and abstracts the choice of chain/product away in the background. Yes, the L1 or L2 is still important in terms of being optimized to win the AI agent competition – but those with their heels dug in on their chain being the main character (as opposed to the intent of the user), will be left behind in this new agentic world. Users and agents of the future won’t route to you based on your logo or marketing or the shiny conference you hold every year. And there’s a good chance they split transactions across chains/solutions based on pure economics and efficiency. The way it should be, really. Who’s positioned?