The NEAR Foundation appoints the "Five Tiger Generals"; can the narrative of "AI owned by users" break the deadlock?

Author: Zen, PANews

In mid-October 2025, during a critical turning point in ecological development, the NEAR Foundation made one of the most important senior personnel adjustments in recent years, appointing five senior industry professionals in one go to oversee key areas such as product, business, marketing, technology, and human resources.

A management layer replacement that covers multiple key areas is partly due to the scarce attention of developers and funds, as well as increasingly fierce competition among peers; on the other hand, this is also closely related to NEAR shifting its strategic focus towards products and ecosystems of “user-owned AI,” attempting to translate years of technological reserves into truly scalable applications.

As Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR protocol, stated, the addition of five new executives will help transform technology into products, move beyond the Web3 sphere, and promote the global implementation and popularization of AI-native products focused on privacy protection.

“Five Tiger Generals” On Duty: Covering Products, Markets, and Technology

In recent years, the NEAR Foundation, which focuses on underlying technology, made a notable personnel adjustment in October 2025, hiring five senior executives into its leadership team at once. The five new executives previously held important positions at well-known institutions such as Bloomberg, Digital Currency Group (DCG), Flipside Crypto, and dYdX. Specifically:

Matt Kummell: Chief Commercial Officer, who has a rich background in traditional finance and the cryptocurrency space, previously served as Senior Vice President of Operations at DCG and has been a board member of DCG's mining company Foundry and blockchain media CoinDesk. At the NEAR Foundation, he will develop clear business strategies to help the NEAR ecosystem achieve broader market adoption.

Alycia Tooill: Head of People, has been deeply involved in the HR field of tech startups and blockchain companies for many years, previously serving as the HR Manager at Wyre and as the Senior Vice President of People at the blockchain data analytics company Flipside. As the NEAR ecosystem and business landscape expand, attracting and retaining tech talent in the fields of AI and privacy computing has become crucial.

Chris Briseno: Chief Marketing Officer, who has practical experience in cryptocurrency marketing, previously served as the Chief Marketing Officer at the blockchain data platform The TIE before joining NEAR. Briseno is familiar with marketing strategies and community operations in the crypto industry, and his joining aims to enhance NEAR's global visibility and user awareness, strengthen NEAR's market appeal, and truly transform technological advantages into user scale and ecosystem activity.

George Zeng: Chief Product Officer and General Manager of NEAR AI: Zeng has been appointed as the Chief Product Officer of the NEAR Foundation and will also serve as the General Manager of the newly established NEAR AI department. He has a background in product management and entrepreneurship spanning both Web2 and Web3, having previously worked as a product manager at Facebook and served as the Chief Operating Officer of the decentralized exchange platform dYdX. His appointment reflects NEAR's strong commitment to AI, and as the head of the NEAR AI department, Zeng will accelerate the development and market investment of NEAR's privacy-focused AI products.

Bowen Wang: Chief Technical Officer (CTO), as one of the core members of the NEAR technical team, Bowen Wang has been appointed as the CTO of NEAR and leads the core R&D work as the founder of the technology team “NEAR One” which focuses on research and development. Bowen is a key member of the early NEAR engineering team, and his technical expertise covers blockchain protocols, sharding technology, and other underlying architectures.

It is evident that the five new executives have decades of deep experience in their respective fields of product, business development, marketing, talent, and underlying technology. Their joining has enabled NEAR to form a diverse and complementary leadership team that collectively drives NEAR's critical transition from the “technological architecture phase” to the “product implementation and commercialization phase.”

“User-Owned AI” strategy

The blockchain industry has seen a new trend of integration with artificial intelligence (AI) in the past two years. As a co-creator of the Transformer architecture, Illia possesses a profound technical background and influence in the AI field, which naturally leads Near to transition from a sharded public chain to integration with AI. The NEAR Foundation explicitly proposed the concept of “User-Owned AI” in mid-2024, believing that the future of AI technology should be controlled by users rather than monopolized by a few tech giants.

NEAR has chosen to address this issue with the goal of building an open AI infrastructure on the blockchain, returning the dominance of data and intelligence to users, thereby avoiding the emergence of “AI oligarchs.” For this reason, NEAR initiated a phased strategic adjustment in 2024, shifting its focus from purely improving blockchain underlying technology to the integration of “blockchain + AI”—committed to becoming a platform that empowers users to control AI.

In order to implement this strategy, the NEAR Foundation established a dedicated team and project structure focused on AI in 2024. This includes the “NEAR.ai Research Lab” led by Illia and co-founder Alex Skidanov, which focuses the company's resources on fundamental research and prototype development related to AI. The lab will first work on creating an “AI Developer” system that automatically builds end-to-end Web3 applications based on user intent using generative AI.

NEAR has planned and launched a series of specific business directions around “user-owned AI”, including privacy-preserving AI computing, core infrastructure development, and the integration of AI with on-chain functionalities. For example, the blockchain intents feature launched by NEAR can be seen as an on-chain interface for AI agents, which is being used to support the first batch of autonomous AI agents that make independent decisions and execute operations on-chain. Intents is a general liquidity layer that allows users to specify their target intention, with the system automatically completing the transaction process in a multi-chain environment. The NEAR Foundation revealed that as of now, the cumulative transaction volume processed by NEAR Intents has exceeded $2 billion, and it is expected to double by the end of 2025.

The NEAR Foundation has also established an incubator and investment department focused on AI projects, HZN, to support early-stage Web3 x AI projects.

The incubation plan will soon yield results. In June 2025, the NEAR Horizon AI incubation program announced six selected teams. These teams include: Mizu, which builds an open data layer; Pond, which analyzes on-chain data using graph neural networks; Nevermined, which designs payment infrastructure for AI commerce; Hyperbolic, which provides open AI cloud services; Ringfence, which enables creators to monetize their works; and Exabits, which offers GPU computing.

On the financial side, the NEAR Foundation announced the launch of the NEAR AI Agent Fund on February 6, 2025. The fund plans to deploy $20 million in liquidity on-chain, focusing on expanding the development of fully autonomous and verifiable agents built on NEAR technology.

Through the aforementioned layout, NEAR gradually completed the shift from focusing on the technology itself to monetization and application of the technology from 2024 to 2025.

NEAR Foundation's Opportunities and Challenges

In the past year, the NEAR Foundation has shifted its focus from building underlying infrastructure to User-Owned AI and product implementation. In recent months, NEAR has been continuously advancing in the direction of “user-owned AI.”

On September 16, the decentralized prediction network Allora Network announced its “collective intelligence/prediction layer” integration into the NEAR ecosystem, aimed at providing usable prediction signals for applications and AI agents in scenarios such as trading, risk control, and routing. In early August, NEAR Foundation reached a collaboration with IQ AI, focusing on “agent assetization” and multi-chain execution: one side supports agents to issue and maintain their own economies on-chain, while the other leverages NEAR Intents and underlying interoperability to encapsulate complex actions such as cross-chain transactions, collateralization, and market making into a process of “intention → automatic execution.”

During the same period, the NEAR team released the annual “State of AI on NEAR: 2025 Update,” identifying AI Agents and verifiable agent protocols as the main focus for the year, and emphasizing collaboration with external liquidity (including Ethereum L2, etc.), enabling agents to naturally call funds and functions across multiple chains. To meet these application-side demands, NEAR continues to promote the practical implementation of Chain Signatures. This capability allows NEAR contracts to sign and initiate transactions on other chains, and can be used to achieve cross-chain liquidity and composable routing for native assets, providing a technical foundation for the subsequent cross-chain execution, clearing, and settlement of AI agents.

In terms of team size and organizational structure, NEAR made a large-scale adjustment as early as 2024, with the official disclosure of reducing about 40% of its staff, aiming to concentrate resources on fewer but more impactful matters. The recent one-time filling of multiple key executive positions at the beginning of this month clearly aims to further accelerate the strategic adoption of AI future and privacy-friendly AI-native products that users possess.

At the same time, in the developer ecosystem, NEAR needs to compete with other public chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Solana, and Avalanche for quality projects and developer resources. Over the past two years, the number of monthly active developers on NEAR has been in a persistent downward trend, and in recent months, there has been a significant outflow of cross-chain developers, approaching the low range of the past year, shifting towards “contraction and reconstruction.”

Today, various public chains (L1/L2 and application chains) have pushed performance, costs, toolchains, and distribution channels to the extreme, making funding and developers' attention even scarcer. Whether the User-Owned AI narrative can be effective will likely depend on a major test of the Near Foundation's execution capabilities and product delivery in the short term. How to stand out in the fiercely competitive Web3 AI space will be a key issue that the new leadership team needs to address.