AI Agents Are Becoming Blockchain's Biggest Users, and NEAR Is Betting Everything On It

🤖 The Case for AI as Blockchain's Primary User

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin made a bold prediction at a recent industry event: artificial intelligence agents, not human users, will become the dominant force driving blockchain activity. "The users of blockchain will be AI agents," Polosukhin stated plainly. "AI is going to be on the front end, and blockchain is going to be the back end." For investors and developers watching both the AI and crypto sectors, this framing redefines what blockchain utility actually means. Rather than expecting millions of everyday users to learn wallets, keys, and gas fees, the future he describes is one where AI handles the entire user experience. Humans interact with a conversational AI interface; the AI manages the on-chain activity underneath. It is a compelling vision, and NEAR is not just talking about it. The protocol is actively building the infrastructure to make that future real.

🧩 Abstracting Away the Blockchain

Central to Polosukhin's argument is the idea that blockchain technology is currently too complex to achieve mass adoption on its own. He was direct in his critique: "The goal is to make your AI hide all the blockchain." He went even further, saying that the existence of blockchain explorers is "effectively a failure, because we don't abstract the technology." The vision is a world where users never see transaction hashes, gas fees, or wallet addresses. Instead, an AI agent handles payments, asset management, governance votes, and service coordination directly on-chain on the user's behalf. For traders and developers, this has practical implications. Platforms that successfully abstract away complexity tend to capture far larger audiences, similar to how the internet became mainstream only after browsers hid the underlying protocols. If blockchain follows the same trajectory, the protocols that make that abstraction possible stand to capture substantial value.

📊 Real Numbers Behind the Agent Economy

The idea of AI agents transacting on-chain is no longer theoretical. According to recent industry data, 80% of blockchain transactions are now automated, with AI agents accounting for the majority of on-chain activity. Virtuals Protocol reported 23,514 unique active wallets and $479.1 million in agentic GDP as of February 2026. Meanwhile, major companies are building the payment rails. Circle launched USDC nanopayments infrastructure targeting AI agents, enabling gas-free batch settlements for high-frequency, low-value transfers. MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, allowing autonomous systems to hold wallets and move funds without human intervention. PayPal and OpenAI partnered to enable instant checkout through the Agent Checkout Protocol. These are not experiments. They are production-grade tools being deployed now to serve autonomous AI systems conducting real financial transactions.

🔧 What NEAR Is Actually Building

NEAR is not just positioning itself rhetorically for the agentic economy. The protocol has released a stack of concrete infrastructure targeting AI-native blockchain use. At NEARCON in late February 2026, the team announced Confidential Intents, now live as of March 1, a privacy execution layer that routes transactions through private shards and trusted execution environments to block front-running and MEV exploitation. They also launched IronClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime that deploys agents inside encrypted enclaves for hardware-enforced confidentiality. The consumer-facing near.com super-app unifies cross-chain swaps and asset management in one interface. A Nightshade 3.0 upgrade aims to push scalability toward 1 million transactions per second. The NEAR token responded: it surged roughly 40% over a week, climbing from around $1.15 to near $1.41, though it remains down over 90% from its 2022 all-time high.

⚠️ Where Polosukhin Draws the Line

Polosukhin was willing to criticize his own industry alongside the competition. He called out DAOs as having "dramatically failed because they have been unbounded, not really designed to solve any problem." On memecoins, he was equally blunt: "The memecoins are ruining the industry's reputation," arguing that the culture of speculation and scams has pushed away serious AI researchers who would otherwise build on blockchain infrastructure. He also identified a core limitation that constrains crypto's growth today: "Blockchain is inherently financial. It will be limited to finance." But rather than treating this as a weakness, he reframed it as a strength. Finance underlies everything we do, from paying for services to managing assets to coordinating organizations. Blockchain as neutral financial infrastructure beneath an AI interface layer is not a niche product. It is the foundation of every transaction an AI agent ever executes.

🎯 What This Means for Investors and Developers

The convergence of AI agents and blockchain payments is attracting serious institutional attention. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol offers cryptographic standards for verifying legitimate AI agents. Google's AP2 standard for agentic payments includes Mastercard and PayPal as participants. Coinbase's x402 initiative revives the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status to enable machine-to-machine micropayments. For investors, the question is not whether AI agents will transact on-chain. The data suggests they already are, at scale. The question is which protocols capture that activity. NEAR is making an aggressive bid with privacy-preserving infrastructure, agent runtimes, and tokenomics adjustments including halved inflation and automatic token buybacks from protocol revenue. The thesis is straightforward: if AI becomes the interface layer for all online activity, the blockchain that powers those AI agents captures value proportional to every transaction those agents ever make.

Sources

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/03/03/ai-agents-will-be-primary-users-of-blockchain-near-co-founder-says https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/03/03/near-rockets-40-in-a-week-as-protocol-undergoes-major-developments/ https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/03/04/circle-launches-usdc-nanopayments-testnet-targets-ai-agents/ https://www.ainvest.com/news/agentic-ai-reshapes-crypto-financial-markets-2026-2603/ https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/ai-and-crypto-agentic-payments/

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