Payments Rule Everything Around Me — by Illia Polosukhin

Why new payment-focused blockchains miss the point and why the real future lies in Intents + Agentic Payments 💵

In this new newsletter, Illia explains how NEAR Intents and AI agents can redefine payments:
🟢 Why blockchains failed to reinvent payments
🟢 How intents can connect crypto, fiat, and real-world assets
🟢 Why stablecoins become fully interchangeable with intents
🟢 How AI agents enable instant, low-fee, autonomous payments

The next generation of payments is not on new chains. It’s powered by intents and agents that work across all of them 👍

🔖Read the full piece & subscribe

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The slime couldn’t resist adding one more layer to the cake

Intear Wallet just got sweeter. You can now create and deploy tokens directly ✔️

🗯 Supported launchpads:
🟢 meme.cooking (mainnet)
🟢 aidols.bot (mainnet)
🟢 Global Contracts feature (mainnet / testnet / localnet sandbox)

Same cake, better taste. Wanna try? 🍰

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Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — NEAR SDK 3 🦀

Welcome to Part 3 (Accounts) of the NEAR SDK series for Rust smart contracts! ☕️

💥 What you’ll learn:
🔴 AccountId is a safe and strict type for representing NEAR accounts
🔴 env::current_account_id() shows how your contract identifies itself
🔴 env::predecessor_account_id() helps detect who called your function

By the end of this lesson you will clearly understand how NEAR accounts work inside contracts, how to separate contract identity from caller identity, and how to build access control for secure multi party dApps 💯

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Third episode in the NEAR SDK series. More coming soon.

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Last week everything was red 🚨

That’s how markets remind us what really matters.
Things that don’t break when the price does ↗️

The NEAR Infrastructure Committee is funding a TEE-secured Price Oracle (more relevant than ever) 🗯

❌ It’s not just another bounty.
✔️ It’s your chance to earn while building something that keeps others safe next time the market turns.

If you can build trust into code, this one’s for you 👈

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Break the Calyx, get paid 🪙

Targets: direct theft, fund freezing, governance manipulation, unbounded gas, griefing, or launchpad logic flaws like re-entrancy or wrong token accounting. Anything that can drain funds or break the launchpad counts 🗯

⚪️ Rewards up to $100,000
⚪️ Test only on private testnets
⚪️ Report via HackenProof within 24h of discovery
⚪️ KYC and POC required for payouts
⚪️ Rewards may be paid in AURORA tokens (with vesting)

🔗 Details & submission

Good hunting 👨‍💻

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NEAR Foundation enters its next growth phase

Over 5 years NEAR shipped everything it promised.
Sharding. Chain abstraction. NEAR Intents with over $2B in transaction volume. Now it’s using that tech to build AI that’s private, open, and user-owned ✨

NEAR Foundation just announced a new stage of growth with new leaders from Bloomberg, DCG, Flipside, and dYdX joining the mission.

🔥 New team:
⚪️ Matt Kummell – Chief Commercial Officer
⚪️ Alycia Tooill – Head of People
⚪️ Chris Briseno – Chief Marketing Officer
⚪️ George Zeng – Chief Product Officer & GM of NEAR AI
⚪️ Bowen Wang – CTO of NEAR & Founder of NEAR One

“NEAR’s vision of open infrastructure powering user-owned and privacy-first AI at global scale is now supercharged with commercial focus.” — Illia Polosukhin 💬

Infra was just the beginning.
Now comes the AI phase of NEAR 😁

🔗 Full announcement

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STARTING SOON

In an hour, 3pm UTC, we will be live and want YOU to bring questions for "Mutual Trust, No Secrets: RODiT and the Future of API Authentication"

Join us as we talk with Discernible IO about RODiT (Rich Online Digital Tokens), a new approach to API authentication with verifiable on-chain identities built on NEAR Protocol.

🎤 Watch our deep dive and ask questions, live on Twitter and YouTube

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Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — NEAR SDK 4 🦀

Welcome to the final part (Gas, PublicKey, CryptoHash) of the NEAR SDK series for Rust smart contracts ☕️

💥 What you’ll learn:
🔴 env::prepaid_gas() to measure and optimize gas usage
🔴 env::signer_account_pk() to verify the caller’s public key
🔴 env::keccak256() to check data integrity and authenticity

By the end of this lesson you will know how to monitor gas consumption, use public keys for identity verification, and apply cryptographic hashing inside your smart contracts 💯

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🔖 Fourth and final episode in the NEAR SDK series.

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NEAR Protocol Update (September 2025)

Why should you watch this? Because it’s not just another update. It’s a real shift in scalability *this is not clickbait*.

In short:
🟡 7–9 shards live, 10th on the way
🟡 200K TPS benchmark (aiming for 1M)
🟡 Block time at 600 ms, targeting 200 ms with “Spice”
🟡 Contracts that scale themselves

But the video breaks down the details behind these changes and shows why “infinite scalability” with NEAR ceases to be a slogan and becomes an engineering fact.

That's actually why you should watch the NEAR September Update.
📺 Click here

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Around SF next week?

There will be an interesting ASIMOV Session on AI, technology and the next stage of human evolution 📈

🔷 Presented by NEAR
🔷 Hosted by EXO x ASIMOV

📍 San Francisco, California
🗯 Don’t just read about it, join it

Free your evening on October 22 and see how intelligence evolves when it belongs to everyone 🧠

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Quick reminder: free RPC/API sponsorships are closing soon ⏳

🗯 The zipper’s almost shut, get your free RPC while it’s still open.
🟢 NearBlocks API — 9d left (Oct 30)
🟢 Pikespeak API — 9d left (Oct 30)
🟢 FastNear RPC — 10d left (Oct 31)
🟢 Lava RPC — 10d left (Oct 31)

Also new Intear RPC are live. Paid, but developer-ready and reliable.

🔖 Pick your side: sponsored or paid, but don’t stay offline.

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Wait… NEAR did what?

The network is preparing to cut inflation from 5% to 2.5%, introduce a program to support small validators, and boost governance incentives for veNEAR holders.

There’s a lot to unpack, so we’ve covered the update in X 👈

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Time to measure the competition 👀

Everyone talks about performance. Now it’s time to measure it 📈

NEAR Foundation Builder Opps launches a bounty to build a data adapter for one of NEAR Intents competitors.

Your mission is to create a plugin that gathers and normalizes key metrics like volume, rates, liquidity depth, and available assets from a single provider.

Each adapter equals one provider and one reward.
💰 700 $NEAR total (100 $NEAR per working plugin)
⏳ Flexible timeline with preferred delivery within 1–2 weeks

Think you can build it? All details here 👈

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“Okay, I’m not here to waste your time…”

With the new update, you’ve got contracts sitting there waiting to be called and NEAR Treasury just gave you the button to make it happen 🫰

Just fill a couple lines, hit submit, and let the chain do the talking.
That’s it. No scripts, no backend, pure on-chain power 👍

Submit. Review. Execute.
It’s easy, but still, before you use it, better learn how it works 👈

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First they conquered the sea. Now they’re sailing the chain 🚀

OceanPal, a NASDAQ-listed shipping company, just raised $120M to build SovereignAI together with NEAR Foundation.

Cargo to code. Ships to sovereigns.
Welcome aboard 🫡

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Imagine explaining gas fees to your AI agent in 2026.

You won’t have to.
NEAR Intents already removed them.
No wallets friction, no gas, no backend. Just clean execution.

See it live: https://dune.com/near/near-intents
Learn more: https://docs.near.org/chain-abstraction/intents/overview

Web3 is finally human 🎉

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HTTP Fetcher for NEAR Smart Contracts 🗯

Ricky recently released a system that allows NEAR contracts to fetch real HTTP data using yield/resume! 🔥

How it works:
🔷 Your contract calls fetch(url) → transaction yields → off-chain relayer executes HTTP request → transaction resumes with the response data

Live on testnet:
🔷 Fetcher: http-fetcher.testnet
🔷 Weather example: weather-example.testnet

Try it:

  near call weather-example.testnet request_weather \
    '{"city": "London"}' \
    --accountId your-account.testnet \
    --gas 300000000000000

What you get:
✅ Rust contracts (fetcher + example)
✅ Off-chain relayer (also in Rust)
✅ Chunked response handling for large payloads

Use cases: price feeds, API integrations, oracle data, weather, any HTTP GET you need on-chain ☀️

👨‍💻 Built by @rickyisnear — GitHub link 👈

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