Your Data Can and Will Be Used Against You — by Illia Polosukhin

Why our online behavior isn’t as harmless as it feels and why today’s data model is riskier than it looks 💬

Illia breaks down how:
🟢 “Free” platforms turn activity into behavioral profiles
🟢 Centralized data creates structural, long-term risks
🟢 Small digital traces compound into real influence
🟢 The future depends on user-owned, privacy-preserving AI

A sharp look at the fork we’re facing and what it means for the role AI will play in our lives 🧠

🔖 Read the full piece & subscribe

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Gas Optimization 🦀

Gas decides how heavy your contract feels ⛽️
This lesson walks through common patterns that increase gas usage on NEAR and shows practical ways to make contract execution more efficient.

If you want to understand what actually affects gas costs and how to reduce them, this episode covers the essentials 💯

📺 Watch the lesson here
👨‍💻 Code examples

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

AI native travel is landing on NEAR ✈️

ADI Chain teamed up with NEAR Protocol to power TravAI, an autonomous travel manager that can
⚪️ book flights
⚪️ find hotels
⚪️ build itineraries
⚪️ handle payments
⚪️ settle everything transparently on L2
…making the whole flow practical rather than experimental.

And the timing could not be better.

NEARCON 2026 takes place this coming February in San Francisco.
If the public launch happens soon, planning the trip with TravAI could become one of the first real use cases ✅

Plan. Travel. Arrive.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Sometimes a small moment sets something bigger in motion.

@vlmoon99’s first encounter with NEAR at a Rust conference was exactly that: a quick wallet creation, a bit of curiosity and a small spark that didn’t look important at the time 🏊‍♂️

That spark led him deeper into how NEAR works, into the architecture, the execution model and everything behind the clean developer experience. Step by step it turned curiosity into contribution, eventually leading to near-sdk-c-sharp, a toolkit that opens the ecosystem to the .NET community.

It is a simple reminder that meaningful things in NEAR often start quietly. Small steps grow into work that expands what the whole ecosystem can do ✅

You can watch the full live session with the discussion and demo here 📺

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

✉️ NEAR Dev News #82 — The November Issue

From NEAR Town Hall to private AI and the road to NEARCON 2026, here’s what shaped NEAR this month.

Here’s the rundown:
✅ Brave’s Leo now runs through NEAR AI
✅ NEAR Intents adoption continues to grow
✅ HOT Wallet Connector streamlines cross-app authentication
✅ OutLayer pushes smart contracts further
✅ SovereignAI treasury reaches 53.9M NEAR
✅ NEAR Quests now live
✅ NEARCON 2026 announced for San Francisco
… and more inside the full issue.

🔗 Read the full & subscribe: https://docs.near.org/newsletter
🔖 Explore active freelancing opportunities: https://nearn.io/

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

From theory to deploying an NFT Global Contract

Episode 4 shows how Global Contracts are taken from theory to an actual on-chain deployment as part of the NEAR Merch Store Project 👨‍💻

This is a focused highlights cut.
The full context lives in the live sessions.

👉 See what they built

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Where the NEAR Rabbit Hole begins

NEAR Rabbit Hole is a long-form series that breaks down the NEAR Protocol step by step, focusing on how the stack actually works rather than surface-level explanations 🐇

Episode 1 sets the foundation, covering NEAR’s architecture, performance, sharding, NEAR Intents and developer experience, and sets up the deeper dives ahead.

NEAR Rabbit Hole, Episode 1. Watch here 📺

Sponsored through NEARN as part of the Public Goods for NEAR Protocol sponsorship.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Rust Smart Contracts on NEAR — Token 🦀

This lesson walks through a practical implementation of a NEAR fungible token in Rust, based on the NEP-141 standard, with a custom whitelist mechanism layered on top of it.

The video also highlights alternative ways to create FT on NEAR, including a simple option and an ERC-20-like approach 💥

📺 Watch the lesson here
🏊‍♀️ Code examples

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

🏊‍♀️ Recent updates across NEAR’s Rust tooling

Several core Rust tools shipped new releases over the past two weeks, bringing practical improvements across indexers, local testing, smart contracts and CLI workflows 👨‍💻

What changed:
➡️Lake framework aligned with latest nearcore crates
➡️More reliable sandbox with cleaner shutdowns
➡️Faster near-sdk-rs iteration with new protocol support and better APIs
➡️near-cli-rs updates with refreshed UI and MPC signing

With these updates, tooling becomes more predictable, with fewer workarounds and a smoother developer experience ✅

You can also check out the thread for more details 🔗

Releases: near-lake-framework-rs, near-sandbox-rs, near-sdk-rs and near-cli-rs.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Where the NEAR Rabbit Hole goes deeper

Episode 2 looks at how NEAR is building the infrastructure for an agentic AI economy and why this shift matters.

It covers NEAR’s sharding architecture, stateless validation, performance, and AI-native tooling like Shade Agents and the MCP Server, along with ecosystem projects focused on privacy and user-owned AI.

NEAR Rabbit Hole, Episode 2. Watch here 📺

Sponsored through NEARN, as part of the Public Goods for NEAR Protocol campaign.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Community proposal: NATL (NEAR AI Trust Layer)

A community member on Reddit published a proposal exploring how trust for autonomous AI agents on NEAR could be built without reputation systems, intent judgment, or centralized certification 🤺

In short, the author proposes the following:
➡️AI agent actions are assumed valid by default under an optimistic model, with accountability enforced through provable outcomes.
➡️Trust is earned gradually through consistent behavior and decays automatically over time.

According to the proposal, this shifts trust from static reputation to a dynamic, measurable state of economic responsibility, anchored on NEAR and extended to cross-chain actions via Chain Signatures.

🔗 For complete context, read the full proposal

What do you think about this approach? Feedback and discussion are welcome 😁

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

In < 5 minutes

1. NEAR extends Bitcoin and Ethereum to user-owned data and AI
2. Data ownership, verifiability, decentralization
3. Why AI raises the stakes
4. The cypherpunk vision for AI
5. 🔥🔍🐇

NEAR Rabbit Hole, Episode 3. Watch here 📺

Sponsored through NEARN, as part of the Public Goods for NEAR Protocol campaign.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

The end of 2025 is approaching.

🚨 Sponsorship: Public Goods for NEAR Protocol (Q4 2025) is in its final phase.

If you have an idea that can be turned into a real public good for the ecosystem, you still have time to submit it without waiting for a better moment or some future opportunity.

Focus areas:
➡️Developer tooling, documentation, onboarding, infrastructure.
➡️Open, reusable, useful beyond a single project.

This is the moment to turn an idea into something real ☕️

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

In < 6 minutes

1. NEAR as the universal liquidity layer
2. What chain abstraction actually means
3. Why NEAR Intents are a game changer
4. Real adoption and on-chain numbers
5. The chain abstraction tech stack
6. How Chain Signatures work
7. 🐇❤️

NEAR Rabbit Hole, Episode 4. Watch here 📺

Sponsored through NEARN, as part of the Public Goods for NEAR Protocol campaign.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

From everyone at DevHub, happy holidays! 🎉

We wish you a warm holiday season and a moment to reset.

Based on our recent poll, for many, this time isn’t a pause. Learning continues, ideas take shape, and development on NEAR moves forward.

NEAR grows through these moments and through the constant exploration and thoughtful progress driven by builders like you.

Thank you for being part of this journey ❤️

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

We can’t prove who sees your data.
But we can prove where privacy is enforced.

Verifiable execution matters.
👉 near.ai

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

Fast FT transfers on NEAR — claiming service shipped

The “Fungible Tokens Claiming Service” bounty goes to Sonce! 🏆

This work delivers a batching-based FT claiming service designed for high-volume token distribution, significantly improving throughput by decoupling user claims from on-chain execution ⚡️

The implementation is merged and available in the repository.
🔗 Bounty & Repository

Congrats and thanks for the great work! 🎉

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

BUIDL Europe is almost in Lisbon.

A two-day technical conference built for people who actually ship. Deep conversations, real architecture, and builders openly exchanging ideas, everything as it should be 😁

Among the speakers:
⚪️ Illia Polosukhin — Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol & NEAR AI
⚪️ Alex Shevchenko — Co-Founder of Aurora
⚪️ Erica Kang — Founder of KryptoPlanet
…and other well-known voices from across the Web3 builder ecosystem.

Why this matters:
BUIDL Europe prioritizes interaction over passive content consumption. The format favors technical sessions, in-depth discussions, and extended conversations around system design and architectural decisions.

📍 Lisbon, Portugal (January 7–8, 2026)

Tickets are available. Registration is open.

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree

✉️ NEAR Dev News #83 — The December Issue

From private AI infrastructure to scaling benchmarks and ecosystem governance, here’s what shaped NEAR in December.

Here’s the rundown:
✅ NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat launched with hardware-backed, verifiable privacy
✅ NEAR demonstrated a 1M TPS sharded benchmark
✅ NEAR Intents adoption continued to grow
✅ near-cli-rs shipped MPC signing flows and related tooling updates
✅ veNEAR governance rewards went live in House of Stake
… and more inside the full issue.

🔗 Read the full issue & subscribe: https://docs.near.org/newsletter
🔖 Explore active freelancing opportunities: https://nearn.io/

🟦 Channel | Chat | LinkTree