NEAR Foundation Unleashes $20M Fund for AI Agents

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In a move that’s sure to make your jaw drop, the NEAR Foundation (NF) has announced a $20M liquid fund – the NEAR AI Agent Fund. Yes, you read that right. $20 million! 🤯

Why, you ask? Well, it seems that the folks at NEAR believe that AI agents are the future of crypto and AI. The fund will support agent tokens for user-driven use cases, and it comes hot on the heels of their announcement to expand their NEAR protocol agent.

According to the official blog announcement, the fund will be used for the development of on-chain agentic design that goes beyond the basic social poster agents. They’re also seeking to work with ecosystems like Sky and Fraz for the development of AI agents with novel use cases.

AI Agents on NEAR Protocol: A Match Made in Heaven?

The AI agents to be developed on the layer-1 blockchain of NEAR Protocol will provide technical, financial, and strategic guidance to developers. These agents can help decentralized applications (dApps) become intelligent, efficient, and user-friendly, potentially tapping the complete potential of the growing Blockchain technology and AI.

$20m. One mission.

Introducing the AI Agent Fund from the NEAR Foundation.

Investment dedicated to decentralized AI use cases and mass market consumer solutions.

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) February 6, 2025

The AI Agent Market: A Growing Obsession

The AI agent market has been witnessing great highs for the intersection and development of AI and crypto. The integration of AI agents in various applications such as Trading and Market Analysis, Decentralized AI and Smart Contracts, Web3 customer support, have been recently fueling a great amount of money in it.

  • Autonolas – AI-powered autonomous agents for Web3 applications.
  • Fetch.ai – AI-driven DeFi and data-sharing platform.
  • Numerai – AI-powered hedge fund leveraging machine learning models.
  • SingularityNET – AI marketplace built on blockchain.
  • Arweave AO – AI-powered decentralized computing for Web3.

Various other platforms like Kima introducing an AI agent to manage cross-chain liquidities, Propichain and Fraktion using them to revolutionize the real estate market, the market is set to grow. As of early 2025 only, the combined market cap of AI Agent market stands at $9.74 billion – highlighting the huge space that it has already secured.

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2025-02-10 17:17