NEAR Protocol had a month in which most blockchain projects span the course of a full year.
From surpassing $19 billion in all-time volume on NEAR Intents, going live with secret payments on near.com, to signing a real government AI deal in Bermuda, the protocol doesn’t pause to celebrate any one win before moving on to the next.
Full monthly update Shared via NEAR Protocol’s official account, It paints a picture of a network firing on multiple fronts at the same time.
This is not a roadmap teaser. These are shipped products, live integrations, and signed partnerships, delivered within one month.
NEAR Intents surpasses $19 billion and continues to climb
This month’s headline figure belongs to NEAR Intents, which exceeds $19 billion in all-time volume and exceeds 25 million total swaps. These are not projected numbers, they reflect the actual on-chain activity accumulated since the product launch, and it is clear that the pace is not letting up.
Adding to this momentum, NEAR Intents began running cross-chain swaps within the Ledger wallet this month, bringing the protocol’s swap infrastructure directly to one of the most widely used hardware wallet interfaces in the space. The integration is also expanding further with the rollout of private USDC payments for the NEAR AI Agent Market, adding a confidentiality layer to the transactions occurring within the AI ecosystem that NEAR is working to create.
Furthermore, NEAR Intents is joining the strkBTC consortium, expanding its reach into the Bitcoin-backed asset space. The $VVV token is also running on both NEAR Intents and near.com, adding another active asset to the platform’s trading pipelines.
Secret payments are posted on near.com
One of the most significant product launches this month is the arrival of confidential payments on near.com, which was introduced alongside Universal Send. This is not a testnet feature or beta tag, it exists and users can access it directly through the near.com interface.
The timing goes down well. NEAR has been trending toward a privacy layer for some time, and the public conversation about this trend got a high-profile moment when NEAR’s co-founder Ilya Polosukhin sitting with Arthur Hayes on Cumulative To talk about what they call the renaissance of privacy.
The product launch comes along with that conversation. Balanced It’s also moving in the same direction, launching secret vaults this month and expanding privacy tools to include teams that manage funds across the chain.
NEAR AI and the Government of Bermuda sign publishing agreement
This is different from the typical protocol partnership announcement. NEAR AI and the Bermuda government signed a formal partnership this month to deploy AI-powered public services, not a pilot, not a memorandum of understanding, but an active deployment agreement.
The deal positions NEAR AI as infrastructure for government-facing applications, a level of institutional credibility that most blockchain-adjacent AI projects have not come close to achieving.
NEAR is also making an in-person appearance this month, hosting events at Consensus Miami and at the SALT Digital Finance Forum in Bermuda. Bermuda’s presence is not a coincidence, as the government partnership and appearance at the forum occur in the same location, and together indicate that the relationship with Bermuda is deeper than just a single press release.
Dynamic redesign and core protocol upgrades are shipped
On the protocol layer, NEAR is introducing dynamic redistribution this month, a technical upgrade that adjusts the network segment architecture based on actual load rather than static configurations. It’s the kind of foundational work that rarely makes the headlines but is hugely important to long-term scalability.
As transaction volume grows and more applications run on NEAR, the ability to dynamically reclassify keeps performance stable without the need for constant manual intervention.
IronClaw is also shipping this month, releasing v0.28 under the name IronClaw Reborn. The release represents a meaningful update to the tools layer that developers working within the NEAR ecosystem rely on day after day.
NEAR AI charges PII and launches AttackBench using FailSafe
The AI side of NEAR’s roadmap continues to move quickly. NEAR AI is introducing Automatic PII Anonymization this month, a feature that removes personally identifiable information from data inputs without requiring developers to build that layer themselves.
For any AI application that handles user data at scale, this is the type of infrastructure that makes compliance and privacy more manageable out of the box. NEAR AI is also partnering with FailSafe to launch AttackBench, a tool designed to test AI systems against hostile inputs and surface vulnerabilities before they reach production.
As the broader AI field begins to take safety and robustness seriously, NEAR AI is moving early to put the testing infrastructure in place where responsible deployment requires it.
Staking Bitwise’s ETP draws $3 million and referrals start soon
On the market and ecosystem side, the Bitwise NEAR Scking ETP is attracting nearly $3 million in inflows this month, a clear sign that institutional appetite for exposure to NEAR is growing through regulated product structures. ETP flows of this type represent a different class of investors entering the picture, one that typically moves more slowly but commits longer.
Near.com Referrals is also launching this month, opening up a new growth channel directly within the platform. The referral system allows existing users to bring new participants into the near.com ecosystem, turning the user base itself into a distribution layer. It’s an obvious mechanism, but launched as near.com adds real products, discreet payments, live swaps, VVV dollar trading, and the referral program arrives at something truly worth sharing.
Taken together, this month makes a strong case that NEAR Season is more than just a phrase. The network is supercharging infrastructure, signing enterprise deals, crossing scale milestones, and expanding AI capabilities, all at the same time. The agent economy that keeps referring to it is not a futuristic concept anymore. It’s being built now, one update at a time.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before purchasing any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.
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