NEAR Deep Investment Value Analysis: Reassessing Value from Underlying Architecture Evolution to Full-Chain AI Operating System

Ethereum killer" or "high-performance monolithic chain," quietly completing its evolution from a Layer 1 public chain to a foundational infrastructure for Web3.

This article aims to cut through market noise and return to first principles by sorting out NEAR's technological evolution from 2018 to 2026 (including SPICE upgrades, stateless validation, and other underlying innovations), the deflationary reconstruction of its token economic model, and the core moat formed in the fields of AI agents and chain abstraction, objectively assessing its real network value, ecological barriers, and cross-cycle investment logic. This article also hopes to answer a question: As NEAR gradually evolves into an AI Native infrastructure platform, does the market's continued use of the valuation framework from the previous public chain cycle, viewing it merely as a traditional Layer 1 public chain for pricing, need to be reconstructed?

Value Guide: Key Terms to Understand NEAR's Value

It must be said that the naming of the Near project is quite artistic, with terms like Nightshade, Intents, Chain Abstraction, SPICE, Stateless Validation... However, many investors have been deterred by these unfamiliar names before they could grasp its true value.

I often need to ask project members what these terms mean, which causes a significant portion of the project's value to be buried under the cognitive barriers of terminology. In fact, these seemingly complex terms are not meant to show off but correspond to NEAR's core underlying innovations. Once you string these concepts together, you will find that:

NEAR is not about having many functions; rather, the entire technical system revolves around one goal—enabling blockchain to truly support billions of users and AI agents in the future.

So before we formally analyze, let’s explain some unique and characteristic terms from the NEAR project to significantly reduce the difficulty of understanding the value discussed later: (If you are already a NEAR veteran, you can skip this section; if you are researching NEAR for the first time, I actually recommend you read it carefully, as the following sections will almost entirely revolve around these concepts)

1. Nightshade Sharding: NEAR's native dynamic sharding architecture achieves both single-chain experience and horizontal scalability. It addresses the traditional public chain's issue of "performance improvement requiring a sacrifice of decentralization."

The official definition is a "logical monolith, physical sharding" underlying architecture. In simpler terms: traditional sharding (like Cosmos or early Polkadot) builds multiple high-speed highways that do not connect, making cross-chain interactions very painful; whereas Nightshade sharding quietly widens a single-lane road into dozens of parallel lanes. Drivers (developers and users) do not feel that they are being diverted, and global liquidity remains unified, but congestion is completely eliminated.

2. Chain Abstraction: Users do not need to care about which chain they are on; they only need to express "what they want to do." It allows multiple chains like BTC, ETH, SOL, Base, Arbitrum to gradually retreat behind the scenes, with NEAR responsible for unified coordination and execution.

It completely shields the complexity of underlying blockchain infrastructure at the protocol layer. In layman's terms: it is the "all-in-one card" of Web3. You do not need to understand the different currencies (gas fees) and cumbersome customs (cross-chain bridges) of chains like Ethereum and Solana; just swipe this NEAR account card, and the backend will automatically handle all the complex cross-chain exchanges and asset settlements for you. (Currently, many public chains, exchange wallets, and DEX's smooth exchanges are actually running NEAR's chain abstraction behind the scenes)

PS: Therefore, I personally prefer to call this concept chain energy aggregation rather than chain abstraction, haha.

3. Near Intents: Users tell the network their goals, and the network automatically finds the optimal execution path. For example: "I want to buy an NFT on Solana using USDC from Arbitrum." The entire complex process of cross-chain, exchange, gas payment, etc., is automatically completed by the Intents network.

It is the core routing network that executes chain abstraction. In simple terms: traditional on-chain transactions are like "manual driving"; you have to buy gas, manage authorizations, and check paths yourself; Intents (intents) are like "ride-hailing"; you just need to issue a demand in the front end, "I want to use money from Arbitrum to buy an NFT on Solana," and countless experienced drivers (solvers) in the backend will instantly grab the order, helping you find the cheapest path and automatically execute it for you.

4. SPICE Upgrade: NEAR's next-generation execution architecture further reduces network latency and improves the execution efficiency of high-frequency trading and AI agents. The design goal of SPICE is to further decouple consensus from execution, allowing transaction ordering and state execution to be more parallelized, thereby reducing network latency and providing a higher performance execution environment for machine economy M2M high-frequency trading and AI agent scenarios.

Imagine a restaurant: the front-of-house staff (consensus layer) only quickly records and arranges customer orders; the kitchen (execution layer) cooks in parallel based on the orders in the background. The front-of-house does not need to wait for each dish to be ready before continuing to take orders, and the kitchen does not need to affect the front-of-house's reception efficiency.

The two work together to significantly enhance the throughput capacity of the entire restaurant. Separating "taking orders" from "cooking" allows the blockchain to no longer compute while producing blocks. In traditional blockchains, consensus (determining transaction order) and execution (calculating transaction results) are often highly coupled. Nodes typically need to wait for the transactions in the current block to be executed before they can continue to advance subsequent processes, which limits the overall throughput capacity of the network. (Note: As of July 2026, SPICE is still in the official roadmap's ongoing advancement phase)

5. Stateless Validation: Validation nodes do not need to store the complete chain state to complete transaction validation. This significantly lowers the operational threshold for nodes while providing a foundation for future network scalability.

Validation nodes no longer need to store the entire network's historical data dictionary to validate new blocks. In layman's terms: previously, to be a validation node, you had to carry a whole book of several TB-sized "global ledgers" to start, which was expensive in hardware costs; now, the system directly provides you with the "single-page cheat sheet (state witness)" needed for this transaction, and after validation, you can discard it. Even an ordinary home computer can easily become a node, drastically lowering the hardware cost ceiling.

Why are these five concepts so important?

If we consider NEAR as a "next-generation internet operating system," then:

• Nightshade addresses computational capacity (how to scale)
• Stateless Validation addresses validation efficiency (how to lower node costs)
• SPICE addresses execution efficiency (how to enhance performance)
• Chain Abstraction addresses multi-chain interoperability (how to connect the entire Web3)
• Intents address user experience (how to make Web3 as simple as Web2)

The five are not independent of each other but collectively form a complete technical closed loop of NEAR's evolution from a Layer 1 public chain to AI Native + Chain Abstraction infrastructure. After understanding these five points, we can further advance to more specific value analysis.

1. Reconstructing the Underlying Logic of NEAR Protocol: From EVM Limitations to Account Model Optimization

Project Positioning: AI Native Layer 1 | Blockchain Abstraction Layer | Public Chain for AI Agents

Before discussing the long-term investment value of the NEAR public chain, let's clarify its essential differences in underlying design compared to public chains like Ethereum and Solana. In recent years, the public chain track has fallen into blind internal competition over the extreme physical performance of single nodes, collectively ignoring the biggest pain point hindering Web3's path to mass adoption: the counterintuitive account system, high user cognitive barriers, and isolated state models.

Co-founders Illia Polosukhin (one of the core authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need," which laid the foundation for modern large language models) and Alexander Skidanov (former leader of Microsoft's and MemSQL's top distributed databases) injected "AI genes" and "distributed database" design philosophy into NEAR from its inception in 2018. This directly established the underlying framework of the NEAR public chain: anticipating the future AI agents' demand for high-frequency automated execution on-chain infrastructure and the experience of seamlessly processing massive concurrent data through horizontal sharding.

To support billions of users and high-frequency machine intelligence (M2M) interactions in the future, simply copying Ethereum's rigid address system based on EOA (Externally Owned Account) is absolutely unfeasible. EOA has led to endless phishing attacks, theft of authorizations, and tragedies of lost private keys, with the root cause being the absolute forced binding of "identity" and "control (private key)" under the EOA mechanism. Therefore, NEAR's most core and long-lasting underlying innovation lies in the complete reconstruction of the account model.

Summary:

Understanding Ethereum's EOA System and NEAR's Account Model
If we compare Ethereum's Externally Owned Account (EOA) system to an "old-fashioned single-hole safe," you either have a unique physical key (private key) to take all the money inside, or you cannot open it at all. This "single point of failure" in permissions is rigid. When you click Approve on a DApp, you are essentially handing over a copy of that unique key to a hacker. Once the mnemonic phrase is stolen or authorization goes wrong, all assets inside can be instantly emptied.

Not only ordinary users but even security-conscious veterans encounter asset theft due to the black-box nature of the underlying authorization mechanism when interacting with a select few DApps in mainstream Web3 wallets (like the author's own experience with the OKX Web3 wallet). For instance, hackers may first steal small amounts of Gas during their infiltration period and then transfer the entire balance. This security anxiety is a fatal wound that hinders large funds from entering the market.

In contrast, NEAR's account model is fundamentally a flexible "smart contract container," resembling a "modern corporate account." Its address natively supports human-readable formats (like st.near, without relying on external services like ENS) and can seamlessly mount countless "Access Keys" with different levels of permissions on this account. You can grant the "Chief Financial Officer (Full Access Key)" absolute rights to transfer core assets and lock them in a cold wallet; at the same time, you can issue limited keys (Function Call Key) to the "front desk" or an "AI agent" that only allow calling specific DApps with a maximum daily Gas consumption of $10.

Even if the front desk key is accidentally lost or the AI agent is hijacked, the main assets remain intact, and the main permissions can be revoked with a single click at any time.

NEAR's Access Key is Protocol Native, not implemented through wallet plugins. This is a step above ERC4337.

This complete decoupling of "identity entities" and "execution keys" at the protocol level brings revolutionary results: it not only allows for a seamless experience at the Web2 level, such as FastAuth (based on biometric FaceID/fingerprint login) and social recovery, to be natively supported by the protocol, but also lays a crucial foundation for the comprehensive integration of AI agents in 2026 (safely granting AI limited smart contract execution rights), addressing the "asset security anxiety" of AI accessing on-chain finance.

2. 2018-2026 Technological Evolution: The End of State Bloat and the Realization of Infinite Scalability

Unknowingly, it has been 7 years since I wrote my first in-depth investment analysis on NEAR in 2019, when NEAR's token economy was still in the making. The history of NEAR's technological evolution is essentially a hardcore computer science engineering story battling blockchain "State Bloat" and "computational bottlenecks." While many Ethereum-based networks adopted Layer 2 stacks (or even Layer 3) as a compromise that fragmented global liquidity and increased systemic risks of cross-chain bridges, NEAR chose to tackle the most challenging technological heights: horizontal scaling at the protocol level.

Table.1 NEAR Protocol 2018-2026 Roadmap and Completion Rate

As early as 2020, NEAR launched the Nightshade protocol (Nightshade 1.0). Unlike traditional sharding that rigidly splits the network into multiple parallel chains (like early Polkadot or Cosmos application chains), Nightshade logically maintains a single main chain (ensuring global composability, so developers and users do not feel the existence of sharding) while physically slicing blocks into multiple data chunks for parallel processing.

Pic.1 Nightshade Sharding Technology Basic Diagram

By 2024 to 2026, NEAR completed several textbook-level underlying upgrades, establishing substantial advantages in technical completion and concurrent processing capabilities within the industry:

• Stateless Validation (Nightshade 2.0): With the continuous accumulation of active users and smart contracts on-chain, all traditional public chains face the fatal "State Bloat" problem. In the past, full nodes had to store and retrieve the complete "global state tree" in a large and expensive NVMe SSD to validate any new transaction. This caused the hardware costs for validating nodes to rise exponentially, ultimately leading to a centralized network controlled by a few institutions. The introduction of stateless validation changed the validation paradigm. Validation nodes no longer need to store dozens of TB of historical states; they only need to obtain the "State Witness" (a small data packet with cryptographic proof) required for the current transaction to complete mathematical validation.

• SPICE Upgrade (Complete Decoupling of Consensus and Execution): Traditional public chains (like Ethereum or even early Solana) have a strictly coupled processing mechanism, where nodes must wait for all transactions in the current block to be executed step by step and the state updated before they can package a block. This serial waiting severely slows down the network. The SPICE upgrade fundamentally decouples "consensus ordering" from "state execution" at the architectural level.

The official goal of this architectural revolution is to compress NEAR's block time to the physical limit of 200 milliseconds, with finality requiring only 0.4 seconds. This performance completely surpasses the latency of traditional blockchains, reaching the delay standards of high-frequency clearing engines in traditional finance like NASDAQ.

• Dynamic Resharding: In the face of sudden traffic (such as popular NFT minting, hot meme coin launches, or AI high-frequency arbitrage surges), traditional monolithic networks (like Solana) often can only passively endure network congestion or, like Ethereum, suffer from skyrocketing Gas fees. NEAR's underlying protocol monitoring mechanism can automatically "dynamically shard" congested shards into new shards based on real-time load and computational resource consumption within about 2-3 seconds, distributing traffic and automatically merging shards when traffic subsides, all without downtime and completely imperceptible to front-end users. This "elastic infinite scalability" capability is a core guarantee for maintaining extremely low and stable Gas fees across the entire network when dealing with the high-frequency and pulse-like sudden transaction flows generated by AI machines in 2026.

3. In-Depth Deconstruction of NEAR's Tokenomics: Deflationary Flywheel and Business Closed Loop

2026 Basic Economic Model Data:

Table.2 Near Token Basic Circulation Data and Market Value

According to the latest official data and CMC data, as of July 14, NEAR's overall valuation FDV is $2.57 billion, with an overall circulation rate of nearly 100%, eliminating the pressure of large future releases that all industry projects fear. In a fully circulating state, the overall value of future project tokens is directly connected to the project's core development, progress, and supply-demand scarcity.

Pic.2 Near Token Release Chart (Data Source: CMC)

To assess the long-term vitality of a Layer 1 asset and the safety net for investment, tokenomics is the core metric. In the past, the vast majority of public chains (including early NEAR and most of the current new L1s) relied on high inflation (issuing new tokens) to pay for the network's security budget (i.e., providing block rewards to miners/validator nodes). This is essentially a long-term dilution that continuously "bleeds" all token holders. Many projects fell into this trap in recent years.

This model of "using future high inflation to subsidize current network security and using tokens to subsidize false TVL" is no different from a Ponzi scheme when there is a lack of real external cash flow income. Once the market turns bearish, the flywheel will collapse instantly. However, entering the 2025-2026 phase, NEAR has made two decisive turns in its economic model, completely unlocking the positive closed loop of business logic:

• Cliff-style Halving and Tightening of Basic Supply: Through highly consensual on-chain governance proposals, NEAR emulates Bitcoin's halving philosophy, reducing the network's maximum annual inflation rate from 5% to 2.5%. This means that the new selling pressure released to the market each year is directly halved, and the 2.5% inflation rate is lower than that of most countries. After deducting the basic burn caused by the massive daily transactions on the network (70% of the basic fees per block are burned), the actual net inflation rate is suppressed to a very low level. From the supply side, this effectively builds the first line of defense for token prices.

NEAR Intents Fee Switch Activation (Empowering Real Commercial Revenue): This is the most critical turning point for the $NEAR economic model to undergo a qualitative change, moving towards the logic of traditional high-yield income assets. As NEAR Intents rises as a unified cross-chain execution abstract network, its current cumulative processing of real cross-chain transactions and swap volumes has exceeded $20 billion. The protocol has officially launched the "Fee Switch" at the protocol layer, beginning to extract a fraction of a percent in fees from these extremely high-frequency real cross-chain financial activities.

Most importantly, the protocol will directly introduce these real external revenues, denominated in fiat currency, USDC stablecoins, or mainstream blue-chip assets (such as BTC, ETH), into decentralized DEX, enforcing buybacks of $NEAR tokens on the open market and completely destroying them (or injecting them into a long-term ecological dividend pool).

Data Profiling and Benchmarking Against Web2 Tech Stock Financial Logic: This mechanism perfectly aligns with the most mature "Share Buyback" logic of Web2 profit-making tech giants (like Apple and Microsoft). It does not rely on false issuance subsidies but earns real money to reduce the circulating supply.

Moreover, the valuation logic of blockchain Web3 projects will be even richer than that of Web2, as the unique properties of tokens and the immediacy of value transfer, along with multi-dimensional usability, directly increase the multiple consumption and user experience across different scenarios. Not only does it involve voting and dividend rights like stocks, but combined with detailed on-chain data analysis models, when the daily average cross-chain transaction volume of NEAR Intents stabilizes above $177 million, the massive gas burning generated by the extensive and continuous computing power of AI will mathematically correlate the total destruction and buyback volume with a historic "golden cross" of 2.5% new issuance (i.e., Burn ≥ Issuance).

Pic.3 The image is only a schematic representation of the inflation-deflation trend when NEAR has no indicative explosive demand, helping users to understand; the timeline is for case reference only

This means that the NEAR network has not only stopped the dilution of value for holders but has also officially entered a "deflationary" cycle, relying on the abundant cash flow from the real external business world (cross-chain clearing, global exchange commissions, AI intent settlement). In the context of the entire crypto market being filled with unprofitable and high FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) projects, this Layer 1 asset with strong positive commercial cash flow discount logic is undoubtedly scarce. However, the project's additional value is also closely related to the overall market trend and sentiment. In times of market frenzy or panic, value misalignment often occurs, just like in the World Cup prediction market. For the same Argentina team, its winning odds may fluctuate from 80% victory in excitement to 4% in panic, and then reverse back to 100% victory. The market's sentiment cannot analyze its intrinsic level; it can only measure the score and remaining time. Of course, this example is essentially an option, and for a long-term token like NEAR, it serves merely as a reference for short-term emotional fluctuations.

Pic.4 Real-time data chart released by NEAR showing the transition to deflation (updated on July 14)

Regarding the explosion of the AI economy, I personally lean towards an exponential explosion rather than a linear one. After the initial experiments and logical safety validations are successful, a larger-scale explosion may occur. By then, the amount of GAS consumed and the overall value enhancement of the project will be even more anticipated.

4. The Ultimate Form of NEAR AI Native Public Chain: Verifiable Confidential Computing and Agent Economy

The macro narrative trend of 2026 has long shifted from simple DeFi Ponzi mining to a machine-led "AI Agentic Economic Network." While major public chains, including startups, are eagerly slapping "AI" labels on themselves (such as simply issuing an AI concept meme coin or merely storing the results of AI models on-chain), NEAR, relying on Illia's background in large model research and networking barriers, has chosen a hardcore and technically grounded path that is difficult for other chains to replicate: building a verifiable confidential computing environment to establish digital ownership of AI agents and an automated economic settlement network.

The core breakthrough component of this implementation is IronClaw, an open-source and verifiable confidential AI agent operating environment, which is already being deployed in 2026.

Solving and deducing the "Black Box Paradox": Why do traditional Wall Street quantitative funds, top hedge funds, and even high-net-worth Web3 users still hesitate to let complex AI agents directly take over large amounts of funds for 24-hour high-frequency automated trading? The core issue lies in the inability to break the "black box paradox" of traditional cloud computing. If your AI trading model (which includes the long-cherished weights of your long and short strategies and the private keys controlling millions of dollars) runs on traditional centralized servers like AWS or Alibaba Cloud, the cloud vendor's super administrators, underlying operations personnel, or hackers can physically steal the AI's strategy logic at the memory level or even directly copy the private keys to steal all assets. You are essentially asking institutions to entrust their lives and fortunes to the moral bottom line of centralized data centers.

IronClaw cleverly breaks this deadlock. It deeply integrates blockchain's zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) with Intel SGX/NVIDIA H100 chip-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) confidential computing architecture.

To visualize: this is akin to creating a "cryptographic-grade steel black box" for AI agents within physical servers in the cloud, locked directly by hardware chips. Your private keys and core quantitative strategies run inside this black box, with AI helping you automatically execute complex cross-chain arbitrage or asset rebalancing. Even the cloud vendor providing this physical server or even NEAR's core underlying developers cannot peek into the data inside the box through physical disk removal or high-privilege code intrusion (the memory is chip-level encrypted). However, at the same time, everyone can objectively verify through NEAR's blockchain zero-knowledge proof that this AI is indeed executing operations meticulously according to your original intent (for example, "buy 100 when ETH drops below 2500"), without being tampered with by any malicious code.

On this infrastructure, NEAR has successfully built a thriving "Agent Market". This is not a toy-level chatbot but thousands of independent AI workers with "full economic agency rights". They employ each other on the NEAR chain, purchase API data, and settle micropayments (M2M Payment) in milliseconds. For example, Agent A, responsible for executing trades, can automatically hire Agent B, who specializes in data scraping, to analyze the sentiment on the entire network X (formerly Twitter) and automatically complete salary settlements in milliseconds for a fraction of a cent in $NEAR.

Thanks to the aforementioned SPICE upgrade (0.4 seconds rapid confirmation) and extremely low gas costs, NEAR has become one of the very few networks capable of truly supporting this ultra-high-frequency, micro-dollar-level machine-to-machine economic clearing. In addition, NEAR has deeply joined NVIDIA's startup acceleration program (NVIDIA Inception Program), gaining not only foundational CUDA hardware-level optimization support and enterprise-level GPU procurement priority but also substantively establishing its engineering technical dominance in the decentralized AI computing network.

However, for the use of all agents, personal restrictions at the permission level are still needed, and AI can indeed lead to cases of excessive authorization resulting in the automatic integration and deletion of years of hard work files. Even the most advanced GPT 5.6 and Claude models have encountered similar issues. Therefore, often, a trimmed version of a dedicated AGENT is actually safer. For instance, the agent described above, which only analyzes Twitter or is responsible for a specific trading strategy.

5. Asymmetric Moat: Chain Abstraction Benefits from the Aggregation of Network Liquidity

If AI is the infinite new frontier extended by NEAR, then "chain abstraction" is the most brilliant and lethal move NEAR has made strategically in the face of the Layer 2 melee of Ethereum and the rapid counterattack of Solana in the public chain stock game: abandoning inefficient TVL (Total Value Locked) stock competition with Ethereum and directly embracing and dominating the incremental liquidity of the entire network through the underlying protocol.

While other Layer 1s are still entangled in how to write complex EVM-compatible layers and how to "suck blood" from Ethereum's funds and users through large token airdrops, NEAR has thrown out the ultimate narrative of "chain abstraction". With the underlying breakthrough based on MPC (Multi-Party Computation) network chain signatures, a smart contract on the NEAR network can directly natively generate, sign, and control real addresses on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and even non-EVM chains.

Underlying Logic Deduction and User Journey Deconstruction: The chain abstraction protocol is like a "global universal card" (similar to Visa/Mastercard's global clearing and settlement network) in the Web3 world. In the old days, users had to prepare ETH for fees to go to Ethereum, buy SOL to go to Solana, and had to nervously navigate various vulnerable cross-chain bridges for cross-chain transactions (similar to needing to exchange different fiat currencies when traveling to different countries, which not only incurs significant exchange rate losses but also involves some complexities).

Now, in a typical application scenario: a completely blockchain-illiterate Web2 user, who doesn't even have a mnemonic phrase, only needs to register a NEAR account (this black card) via email. They can initiate a natural "intent" on the front end— for example, "use my 5000 USDC on Arbitrum to purchase a hot-selling NFT on Solana."

Upon receiving this intent, the decentralized solver network underlying NEAR automatically searches for the lowest slippage and the best exchange rate across global liquidity pools within milliseconds. Subsequently, NEAR's MPC verification node cluster jointly signs the instructions, completing the process automatically in the background: extracting USDC from Arbitrum -> exchanging -> cross-chain transmission -> even covering the Solana Gas fee on the target chain for users through a paymaster mechanism -> purchasing NFTs -> depositing into the user's unified multi-chain address. For the end user, they do not even need to be aware of the existence of Arbitrum and Solana; they simply experience a seamless "one-click purchase" akin to "WeChat Pay." The true value lies not necessarily in the underlying assets but in the party that controls user access, transaction routing, and settlement capabilities.

This creates a deep and absolutely exclusive moat: NEAR effectively absorbs all other leading public chains (including Bitcoin's unshakeable strong store of value and Ethereum's vast and prosperous DeFi ecosystem) into its own "liquidity pool of underlying assets" and "passive execution terminal." Once NEAR Intents are deeply embedded in super entry points like the Brave browser, which has 70 million monthly active users, as long as it controls the front-end interaction entry and the full-chain cross-chain routing scheduling rights aimed at end users, NEAR essentially gains the traffic distribution dividends of the entire Web3 commercial era. Moreover, NEAR's earnings at the exchange aggregation level may far exceed those at the browser and project levels.

Summary of NEAR's Core Moat:

• AI Gene Moat: Founding team with an AI research background.
• Account Model Moat: Protocol-native Account Abstraction and Access Keys.
• Chain Abstraction Moat: Chain Signatures + Intents.
• Scalability Moat: Nightshade, Stateless Validation, SPICE.
• Economic Model Moat: High liquidity, Gas Burn, extremely low inflation, potential protocol revenue.

6. Reshaping Web3 Valuation Logic: Moving Beyond TVL to Cash Flow Discount Models Based on Real Earnings

In the current pricing models for crypto assets, the vast majority of primary and secondary researchers and market capital still habitually use the popular TVL (Total Value Locked) or simply L1 TPS narratives from before 2021 to value NEAR in a rigid manner. Due to the meme craze, many people directly use memes and market discussions to value projects, which is an outdated framework that fails to match the commercial essence of NEAR and many new projects in 2026, leading to severe asset value mismatches and undervaluation in the market. Many quality projects receive very low valuations simply because they are not discussed in the market, creating a significant value gap.

When we set aside old prejudices and view NEAR as a "full-chain intent scheduling settlement layer" and "AI computing power unified payment network" with real scalable revenue, we can reference more traditional Web2 technology infrastructure valuation models—such as the Price-to-Sales (P/S) Ratio or Fee Multiple (i.e., circulating market cap / annual protocol total revenue).

The shock of horizontal data benchmarking: If we take the popular cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero (ZRO) as a comparison anchor. LayerZero has a very high valuation (peaking at around $6 billion, currently at $500 million), but the real commercial value captured by NEAR Intents from the cross-chain intent traffic it has taken over (net income from cross-chain fees in the past 30 days) has already reached and exceeded 15 to 18 times that of LayerZero. NEAR, disregarding AI, is already severely undervalued by the market based on its actual market share and profitability in the cross-chain settlement field. It is important to note that the vast majority of AI and Web3 projects, even with valuations in the hundreds of billions, may still be operating at a loss.

Fee Multiple and Safety Margin Advantage: In rigorous financial fundamental calculations, when we sum NEAR's total network base Gas revenue with the substantial cross-chain commissions from Intents, NEAR's current circulating market cap is only about 56 times its annual total protocol fees. In a crypto market where price-to-earnings ratios often exceed a thousand times, this is a healthy figure, even lower than some traditional tech SaaS companies. In stark contrast, some emerging Layer 1s with extremely high FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation), low circulating rates (generally below 30%), and currently undergoing institutional unlock periods (such as Sui, Aptos, etc.) face significant pressure from teams and VC institutions for subsequent sell-offs, and their network's actual protocol fee income is often quite low. If we strictly calculate their P/S ratios, the multiples can reach astonishing thousands of times. NEAR, with nearly all tokens in circulation (over 99% released), no burdens from massive early institutional unlocks, and strong external business revenue capabilities (buyback and burn), has a thick downward valuation safety margin and a high risk-reward ratio.

6.2 From Cash Flow Valuation to Optional Value: Long-Term Value Reassessment of NEAR

Traditional financial markets typically base valuations of companies on current revenues, profits, and future cash flow discounting (DCF). However, for truly platform-oriented tech companies, capital markets often assign another important source of valuation—future growth optionality (Option Value). Whether it is Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, or OpenAI, they are fundamentally not priced solely based on current profitability; rather, the market pays a premium in advance for potential new industry entry points that may form in the future.

For NEAR, it is equally insufficient to rely solely on Gas revenue, protocol fees, and cash flow from Intents for valuation. With the continuous development of AI Agents, Chain Abstraction, and the Machine Economy, NEAR's greater value lies in its long-term scalability as the next-generation digital infrastructure.

Firstly, the value brought by AI Agents to NEAR is not merely reflected in current protocol revenues but resembles a long-term AI call option (AI Premium). The global AI agent economy is still in its early stages, but once AI Agents begin to possess digital identities, autonomous wallets, on-chain asset management capabilities, and can automatically invoke APIs, execute cross-chain transactions, and complete autonomous payments, these high-frequency, automated on-chain behaviors will require the underlying network to provide a stable, secure, and low-cost execution environment. NEAR's layout in account models, Access Keys, Chain Abstraction, Intents, and AI Native infrastructure naturally equips it to undertake this round of AI infrastructure upgrades. Therefore, the value brought by AI should be understood as an expectation of future cash flow growth rather than current revenue itself.

Secondly, Chain Abstraction endows NEAR with unique network value (Network Premium). The competitive logic of traditional Layer 1s often revolves around competing for TVL, developers, and attracting ecosystem migration, while NEAR's goal is not to replace other public chains but to become the unified interaction layer and liquidity routing layer for the entire Web3. In the future, regardless of whether users ultimately use Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Base, or other public chains, they may complete asset management, cross-chain execution, and transaction settlement through NEAR. This means that NEAR's growth does not rely on the decline of other public chains; rather, it has the opportunity to benefit simultaneously as the entire industry scales up, making its business model more akin to payment networks and infrastructure platforms of the internet era.

Furthermore, the Machine Economy may become the largest source of new value in the future. The internet of the past two decades primarily served information exchange between people, while in the next decade, the greater increment may come from automated collaboration between AI Agents (Machine-to-Machine, M2M). Agents can autonomously purchase computing power, invoke APIs, pay data fees, execute on-chain transactions, and even hire other Agents to complete complex tasks. This massive, high-frequency, low-value automated payment network fundamentally differs from traditional payment systems and requires blockchain infrastructure with extremely low latency, very low Gas costs, and high throughput capabilities. NEAR's design in high-performance execution architecture, account abstraction, and chain abstraction aligns well with the development direction of the Machine Economy, thus the future development of the Machine Economy is also expected to further expand NEAR's protocol value capture capabilities.

At the same time, the development of digital identity, the metaverse (Spatial Computing), and future digital asset networks also provides additional long-term value space for NEAR and the entire Web3 industry. Although the concept of the metaverse has seen a decline in popularity in recent years, the rise of AIGC will inevitably reignite interest in the metaverse, and the trends of digital identity, cross-platform assets, unified account systems, and immersive internet have not disappeared. In the future, whether it is AR, VR, digital twins, or spatial computing, the underlying requirements will include unified identity, unified accounts, unified payments, and unified asset management capabilities. NEAR's account model, FastAuth, Chain Signatures, and Chain Abstraction provide good protocol compatibility for these new scenarios. This portion of value has not yet been fully reflected in protocol revenues, but it still constitutes a potential growth space for long-term development.

Therefore, we believe that NEAR's long-term valuation should not be limited to traditional Layer 1 metrics such as TVL, TPS, or short-term ecosystem activity. Instead, it should gradually adopt a comprehensive valuation framework of "fundamental cash flow + network effects + AI premium + protocol optionality." As real protocol revenues continue to grow, the AI Agent economy matures, and chain abstraction connects more cross-chain assets and user entry points, NEAR is expected to evolve from a traditional public chain into the underlying operating system for the entire Web3 and AI era. Its valuation logic is also expected to align more closely with that of internet infrastructure platforms that possess real cash flow and long-term growth potential, rather than merely being a Layer 1 public chain.

Currently, NEAR's FDV is only about $2.5 billion (as of July 2026, DYOR). This valuation reflects the market's perception of it as a traditional Layer 1 public chain amid a bear market and weak PR style, while the long-term value implied by the future AI economy is still in the early pricing stage, suggesting that NEAR's long-term value may be subject to repricing.

7. Overall Value Summary: Structural Dividends Across Cycles and Long-Term Investment Outlook

In summary, from a macro perspective in 2026, facing a new round of easing expectations for global macro liquidity (interest rate cuts) and the intensifying arms race in artificial intelligence computing power, NEAR Protocol is no longer merely an experimental single public chain for tech geeks to discuss TPS extremes.

From the perspective of underlying technology architecture, Nightshade, SPICE, and Stateless Validation together form the performance foundation of NEAR for the AI era, enabling it to support millions of daily active users and industrial-grade intensity for ultra-high-frequency micro-payments.

From a business model perspective, it is one of the few in Web3 that addresses the fragmentation of liquidity across the network through "chain abstraction," and by leveraging real cross-chain revenue and strict foundational halving, it substantially realizes a benign income protocol that enters absolute deflation.

From a forward-looking perspective, it is the only large-scale landing ground where trusted TEE confidential computing, autonomous AI entities, and crypto-native assets perfectly intersect.

The capital instincts of top-tier institutions are often the most acute. The Nasdaq-listed company Sovereign (SVRN) has publicly announced NEAR as its core reserve asset, and traditional Wall Street asset management firms like Bitwise and Grayscale have successively launched compliant NEAR financial trust products, marking a complete recognition of its business logic by mainstream Old Money. The close collaboration with NVIDIA also indicates that NEAR is entering the sights of mainstream institutions.

In a capital market where prices often lag behind the underlying technology and business explosions, NEAR is currently in a phase of asymmetric dividends characterized by "strong fundamentals, a closed business loop, but valuations still suppressed by old cycle models and the overall industry situation." This may be due to NEAR's market PR, particularly in-depth interpretative content being relatively weak. Despite support from founders and top AI companies like NVIDIA and Google, the lack of third-party core analytical content output has somewhat suppressed value discovery.

Moreover, with the rise of memes in recent years, institutions and individuals genuinely willing to conduct in-depth value analysis have been driven to pause their output due to the trend of bad money driving out good. AI's text washing may also significantly reduce the willingness of original and in-depth creators to promote their work. However, from another perspective, AI can help promote genuinely valuable viewpoints and content, and your thoughts and methodologies will gradually influence the entire industry or those outside the circle.

We believe that as chain abstraction continues to enhance liquidity aggregation capabilities, and AI Agents and the machine economy gradually enter the real application stage, NEAR is expected to undergo a cross-cycle value reassessment. Its fundamentals have shown structural characteristics distinct from traditional Layer 1 public chains and possess long-term growth attributes endowed by AI Native infrastructure.

True platform value does not stem from what has already been achieved today, but from how much new economic activity it can continuously support in the future. For NEAR, gas revenue is merely the starting point for value reassessment, while AI Agents, the machine economy, chain abstraction, and the protocol optionality brought by the future digital world may constitute its second growth curve across cycles.