NEAR Protocol

NEAR HACKATHON is now live with $250K+ in prizes. No signup. Just ship a public repo + public demo post between November 1st & Nov 14, 23:59 UTC. Build on NEAR Intents, chain signatures, chain abstraction, NEAR AI Cloud, & more. Full details:

NEAR HACKATHON is now live with $250K+ in prizes. No signup. Just ship a public repo + public demo post between November 1st & Nov 14, 23:59 UTC. Build on NEAR Intents, chain signatures, chain abstraction, NEAR AI Cloud, & more. Full details:

solana:8SMMso8Muv8d6i4WmMDthKt6TN1ysN6937sx3DKLXZqB has been allocated as part of the @NEARProtocol Hackathon Nov 1–14 prize pool Build the next wave of cross-chain DeFi with the RHEA X Chain SDK, powered by NEAR Intents. Let's build. github.com/rhea-finance/rnea…

Qwen 3.8 27B Abliterated is live on NEAR AI Cloud. Refusals removed, for red teaming and security research, with vision. It runs in a TEE, so your findings stay private. $0.04/M input, $1.35/M output, 256K context. Try it free: near.ai/models/Qwen/Qwen3.8-…

Market Bubble Episode 25 - Presented by @polymarket xitter.gq/i/broadcasts/2broodQRd…

E193: @NEARProtocol: NEAR Is Encrypted Ethereum @ilblackdragon is the Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and one of the inventors of the Transformer, the technology behind every AI LLM. Today we talk about why he left Google, how a payments problem pulled him into crypto, and why he thinks AI and blockchain have to be built together. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:52 - Illia's Mission, Explained To An Uber Driver 03:46 - The Fire In Illia's Belly: Where It Came From 05:46 - How Illia Got Out of Where he Started from 06:54 - Moving out of Google That Changed Everything 07:55 - Attention Is All You Need, Explained Simply 10:59 - Did Illia Know He Was Starting A Revolution? 12:13 - Sponsor: @variational_io , @Bitwise 13:02 - Why Walk Away From Google's Fortune? 14:44 - Illia's Reaction When ChatGPT Exploded 15:55 - What Smart AI People Still Get Wrong 17:29 - How AI Led Illia To Crypto 19:50 - Did Illia Drop AI For Blockchain? 21:00 - 6 Years Of NEAR And How It Survived 22:14 - Why Stay In Crypto With An AI Edge? 24:42 - NEAR In One Sentence: Today And Tomorrow 26:39 - Sponsor: @KASTxyz 27:26 - What You Can Build On NEAR And Nowhere Else 29:03 - What's Happening Inside Centralized AI 30:48 - Does Illia Use Claude Or ChatGPT? 31:36 - What You Should Never Use ChatGPT Or Claude For 32:25 - The Danger Of A Few Companies Owning All The Intelligence 34:35 - How Cryptographic Guarantees Actually Work 35:58 - Is There A NEAR GPT? 36:50 - ZEC Explained Simply: Why It Matters 38:24 - $ZEC Is Private Bitcoin. What Is near:native? 39:32 - Is Owning The AI Interface Bigger Than Owning Banks? 40:29 - User Owned AI, Explained 42:05 - Sponsor: @JupiterExchange , @ethena 42:45 - Can User Owned AI Sustain An Economy? 44:55 - The Best Argument Against User Owned AI 46:13 - Open Weight Models, Explained 47:20 - Is AI Doom Further Off Than We Think? 51:15 - The Next Shift Nobody Is Watching 54:08 - What Humans Will Struggle With Most 55:29 - Thank You

The @NEARProtocol Hackathon is live through November 14 with $250K in prizes. Here are a few ideas for things I’d love to see built with @near_intents and @near_ai. ––AI encyclopedia with prediction markets: instead of community curation, every fact becomes a perpetual truth-seeking market (Augur-style). The official pages are generated by AI based on the current market understanding. ––Private trading where you sell your viewing keys for people to follow/copy trade. NEAR Intents confidential trading is all private, so you can have a social trading app where people sell "keys" for only select people to see. PnL can be publicly displayed so people can choose to buy in. ––Universal checkout widget: any merchant/app can add a “checkout” button that enables paying with Intents from whatever wallet and blockchain that user has. ––Swarm-for-Hire (with guardrails or governance AI review, please). Put a bid onchain with a description of the work and anyone can add a new agent to the swarm by giving it NEAR (to pay for inference) with a prompt/knowledge base/tools. All agents accept jobs and get NEAR AI LLM inference from their payment for the job.

Releasing Delta League: edit LLM weights for benchmarking and glory! Join at deltaleague(.)ai Earlier this week, the idea of editing weights directly with an LLM got a lot of attention — but it was shunted by limitations in the demonstrated approach. Delta League is an open competition for everyone to submit deltas to model weights and get them scored on a hidden test set. Auto-research and hillclimb to make smaller models more performant. The broader vision for Delta League is creating a platform for open AI research. Beyond just editing weights, this approach offers verifiable evaluation and an open collaborative space for everyone to continue improving Pareto of open source models. In the coming days, we will extend this platform to support editing model architectures beyond just weights and custom evaluation sets to understand how models perform in specific domains and for businesses.