Investing in NEAR now is an investment in the story of AI agents and cross-chain trading.

NEAR is no longer just a “fast, cheap Layer 1” anymore. That story has been over for a long time. If you only see NEAR as a blockchain competing with Solana, Sui, Aptos, or Ethereum’s Layer 2s, then NEAR hasn't truly won in terms of DeFi flow or ecosystem activity.

But NEAR is taking a more notable direction: becoming an infrastructure layer that makes it easier for users to trade across multiple blockchains, and later potentially serving as a platform for AI agents to autonomously execute trades for users.

The current problem in crypto is that cross-chain experience is still too complicated. To transfer assets between chains, users often have to bridge manually, change wallets, find gas, choose routes, check fees, and bear the risk if they make a mistake. For newcomers, it’s very hard to use; for veterans, it still takes time.

NEAR Intents was created to simplify this. Instead of making users handle each step themselves, they just need to specify the desired outcome, for example “swap USDC on this chain to SOL on Solana.” The backend will handle the transaction routing, find the best path, and execute it automatically.

But to truly run this model across many blockchains, NEAR needs one more piece: Chain Signatures. This technology allows a NEAR account to sign transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Sui, Aptos, and many EVM chains. Simply put, NEAR doesn’t just want to keep users within its ecosystem; it aims to become a transaction coordination layer across multiple chains.

This is why the AI agents story makes sense. If in the future AI agents can manage assets, make payments, swap coins, rebalance portfolios, or find trading opportunities, they will need infrastructure that is simple on the front end but capable of handling many chains behind the scenes. NEAR is trying to build exactly that layer.

The data is also starting to show some notable points:
- NEAR Intents has achieved over $13 billion in cross-chain transaction volume
- 13 million successful swaps, supporting 125+ assets, 25+ blockchains, and over 1.6 million users.

NEAR’s tokenomics has also improved. Max inflation has decreased from 5% to 2.5%, the fee switch has been activated, fees from NEAR Intents are paid in NEAR, and revenue has been used to buy back 1 million NEAR. If this growth trend continues, NEAR’s token could benefit more clearly from user activity when the market picks up again.

But there are still risks when investing in NEAR:
- NEAR’s native TVL is only around $145 million, down about 11% compared to a year ago.
- Daily transactions have dropped from 5.49 million to 761k, active accounts from 420k to 124k.

This means activity on NEAR’s main chain is weakening quite clearly—roughly speaking, the household activity is lazy, while the community activity is more diligent 🤣

Are there any NEAR fans here? 😆 Looking at the chart, the selling pressure seems to be easing, but when the buying will pick up again, nobody knows 😂
$NEAR