2025 has been quite revealing for the NEAR ecosystem. The Intent-based architecture has finally found genuine product-market fit, with over $8 billion in transaction volume flowing through the platform. Following six major chain upgrades, the network is now sustaining throughput exceeding 1 million transactions per second—a significant milestone for scalability. What's more striking is that verifiable AI infrastructure built on NEAR is already live and actively serving 100 million users across real-world applications. The convergence of high-performance blockchain infrastructure with practical AI deployment is shifting how we think about what's actually possible on-chain this year.