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.

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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

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🏊‍♀️ 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.

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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.

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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 😁

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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.

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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 ☕️

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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.

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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 ❤️

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

Verifiable execution matters.
👉 near.ai

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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! 🎉

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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.

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✉️ 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/

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Open Source AI Summit is almost in Lisbon

This one-day technical event will consist of 20-minute solo presentations and informal talks, with topics focused on AI 🤖

What to expect:
⚪️ “Who Owns Intelligence?” - presentation by Illia Polosukhin
⚪️ “NEAR’s Private AI Stack: Models, Agents, and Memory” - presentation by Cameron Dennis
… and other well-known voices from across the Web3 builder ecosystem.

Why this matters:
Open Source AI Summit focuses on concrete AI architectures and ownership models, with an emphasis on technical talks and focused discussions rather than high-level narratives.

📍 Lisbon, Portugal (January 9, 2026)
✍️ Registration is open.

Previous Open Source AI Summit talks are available here 👀

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Stablecoin swaps look easy. Until you try to move a lot of money.

Proximity Labs shared an approach called Stablecoin Transport Protocol (STP).

When large amounts of stablecoins need to be swapped (not USDC or USDT), the same thing usually happens: liquidity runs out, prices move, and the swap becomes expensive 💵

STP uses a different approach. It doesn’t try to trade inside pools. It focuses on executing the swap.

How it works:
⚪️ Someone wants to swap USD1 for PYUSD
⚪️ The funds are locked first
⚪️ A solver program running inside a TEE temporarily borrows protocol funds strictly bound to a single, escrowed execution
⚪️ The swap is executed using deep external liquidity
⚪️ The borrowed funds are repaid immediately

Why this is safe:
⚪️ Solver logic is fixed and enforced inside the TEE
⚪️ Funds can’t be borrowed without a real, escrowed swap
⚪️ Execution follows a strict, predefined order

In simple terms: STP is not about finding prices or trading. It’s about moving large amounts of money safely and predictably 🏊‍♂️

Read the Full Litepaper: https://www.stablecointransport.com/

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In < 6 minutes

1. What actually defined NEAR in 2025
2. Sharding in production (from 6 to 9 shards)
3. Sub-second blocks and fast finality
4. When NEAR Intents stopped being theory
5. Scaling to 1M+ TPS
6. Inflation halving and protocol economics
7. Private AI goes live
8. 🐇🕳

NEAR Rabbit Hole, Episode 5. Watch here 📺

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

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💳 Payments are not what apps want to deal with

Most apps don’t need a “payment module”.
They need a simple fact: the payment went through.

That’s exactly what HOT Pay is built for.

HOT Pay is a payment layer that lets apps accept payments without implementing payment logic inside the application itself 🔥

Under the hood, HOT Pay is built on NEAR OmniBridge and NEAR Intents, enabling payments in NEAR, USDC, USDT, ETH, and 50+ other tokens across 20+ chains.

Where this already makes sense:
➡️ AI and agent-based apps (already available on NEAR AI Cloud)
➡️ SaaS and dev tools
➡️ Subscriptions and usage-based payments
➡️ Products without their own payment logic

In short, HOT Pay doesn’t try to reinvent payments. It simply moves them out of application logic and turns them into an infrastructure concern.

For developers or product owners interested in using it:
➡️ Docs
➡️ Video guide

HOT Protocol is also open to collaboration. Details via DM: @heresupport 👀

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In case you missed 🚨

✨ create-near-app v9.0 quietly crossed an important line ✨

What’s new:
➡️ Frontend templates now use near-connector, providing most of the functionality previously handled by wallet-selector while reducing dependencies and simplifying the setup.

➡️ Smart contract templates no longer rely on a minimal hello-world example. New projects now include an auction contract that demonstrates additional concepts such as structs, deposits, and timestamps.

Why this matters:
The default project scaffold now exposes developers to a broader set of NEAR primitives from the start. This reduces the gap between an initial scaffold and the patterns required when building non-trivial applications ✅

Release details and changelog are available here 👈

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Indexing almost always turns into a separate task.

History, filtering, rebuilding datasets, delays between events and UI all of this quickly stops fitting into simple RPC calls 👨‍💻

In the NEAR ecosystem, there’s an indexing-focused tool called Goldsky.

It reads NEAR data sequentially and streams it into external storage systems like Postgres, ClickHouse, S3, or Kafka. This keeps indexing and data handling outside the application itself.

For a more detailed look, watch the video. You'll see how this works in practice 👀

A trial version is available to everyone. Feel free to try it out. However, it has limitations. You can find more details about them here.

That’s one of the indexing options currently available on NEAR ✅

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Unverifiable AI is an enterprise risk

That’s why NEAR AI joining the NVIDIA Inception Program matters.

This isn’t about branding or acceleration credits. It’s about access to infrastructure that enables enterprise-grade, verifiable AI, specifically through NVIDIA Confidential Computing.

➡️ Here’s the core problem.

Most AI systems protect data at rest and in transit. But once execution begins, models and inputs live in memory that is typically accessible to the host operating system or the underlying infrastructure.

That’s the trust gap.

➡️ NVIDIA Confidential Computing changes this execution model.

In the NEAR AI stack, workloads run inside hardware-isolated environments where memory remains encrypted during execution, and the execution itself can be cryptographically verified.

It’s not just encryption. It’s secure computation with verifiable privacy guarantees 🔒

🔗 Read more here

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