The Only NEAR Protocol Breakdown You'll Need in 2026 (feat. Elliot)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]So, NEAR recently took the top spot as the biggest AI cryptocurrency by market cap. I know a lot of people are curious in what they're currently doing. And I actually got Elliot over here on the channel. He's currently doing DevRel, powering the ecosystem, moving NEAR forward. If there's anybody that can explain what actually's going on in NEAR, it's going to be Elliot. So, welcome to the channel, my friend.

[00:00:22]>> Yeah, thank you for having me.

[00:00:23]>> Of course. So, you're more on the technical side. Can you kind of explain how you got into NEAR in the first place? Cuz from my POV, it feels like they're very crypto forward. It's like a very crypto-centric chain right now. It's not really like Web 2.

[00:00:39]>> I came off of I came into NEAR off of a hackathon, actually, back in 2021. And you're so right that about how like NEAR's narrative has kind of changed and over time. And I came into NEAR because, uh, you know, I was a ambitious young lad. I wanted to found my own company and all this type of thing. I did it for a hackathon project. I ended up getting a grant for it.

[00:01:00]And then, since then, I kind of got hooked into the ecosystem, um, doing a lot of freelancing, doing some dev shopping, uh, working on a lot of different projects, even trying to find my own projects. And then, uh, ever since September, I graduated and now, um, I graduated into working for the NEAR Foundation as a as a official DevRel.

[00:01:21]Um, yeah, but it's been a pretty cool journey ever since. I initially came to NEAR, uh, because of NEAR's tech. I was as a software developer working in, um, the fintech space for 3 years or so. I was kind of looking for, uh, something that was comparable to my Web 2 experience.

[00:01:42]Um, and NEAR kind of fit that fit that bill. NEAR had a heavy focus on developer experience, and I, uh, I really latched onto it from then.

[00:01:53]>> Okay, so for some of us that are less technical, can you explain what the tech actually is for NEAR? Cuz a lot of people say oh the tech is great, the tech is revolutionary, but like what actually is the tech and why should people care about it?

[00:02:08]>> For sure. So, you know, there's a lot of blockchains out there.

[00:02:12]Um you're probably you know, you're familiar with Bitcoin, a proof of work, which aside from a store of value, it doesn't necessarily have a lot of like technical capabilities. You're not you're not necessarily like building smart contracts or applications on Bitcoin, although that's changed now.

[00:02:29]Uh Ethereum is kind of the same way. You were building applications on Ethereum, but there's um there's a different way to think about Ethereum where everything is a public address and um with that there's some con pros and cons, and then you're building on other blockchains, which are like rollups, which uh you know, do their own processing and bundle it all up and send it and push it to Ethereum there. So, NEAR is this kind of new It was like this new type of concept. It essentially looked at the Ethereum roadmap. It saw where Ethereum wanted to be in 5 years and said, "We're just going to go there." So, it built something uh it built around a account model, which is very powerful, where we already have human-readable accounts on NEAR, like I'm ethis.near. You can find me.

[00:03:21]Um And uh on NEAR anything can be a smart contract. Any account can have a smart contract. Those smart contracts can be compiled from WASM, which essentially means that most any languages that can compile into a WASM binary can go on to the NEAR blockchain. That's different from other blockchains that maybe have their own specialized language, like Solidity on Ethereum.

[00:03:45]Uh and then it's horizontally scalable.

[00:03:49]So, it has a sharded design, which means that you uh if you think about like AWS for example, where it has all these different data centers all around the all around the country and those kind of handle their own processes and then they kind of like sync it with the larger node. That's essentially the same type of infrastructure that NEAR has. So by having this design that other blockchains don't have like Solana or Ethereum, it just makes it very scalable where it can expand and it can handle tons and tons of transactions per second.

[00:04:21]I think as of recently, we did a uh we are introducing something called dynamic resharding, which essentially means as there's more um as there's no more processing that's happening on the blockchain, it can scale up individual sections of it and then it'll like process it all and in order to in order to handle that. And so when we do tests with this, we can handle over a million transactions per second, which is more than the Nasdaq, Alibaba, MasterCard and Visa, all of these combined. And that's just off of one single blockchain. I don't I don't really know many that can do that.

[00:05:02]>> And how many transactions per second is NEAR doing right now cuz I imagine they're getting a lot of traction recently.

[00:05:08]>> That's a good question. I wonder actually where I could pull that up.

[00:05:13]>> Okay, so while you pull that up. So okay, so my understanding of this, so what he means by the whole WASM compatibility thing is like he said Ethereum is is coding on Solidity. I think Solana is coding on like Rust or something like that. And just all these different networks have these different ways of coding. It's very complicated.

[00:05:31]Nobody wants to just deal with these different coding languages. They just want to plug and play. So my assumption is NEAR has been able to make it so that you can use any of these languages as long as it's compatible. Just throw it in there and it'll understand. It's like when I use my ChatGPT and I throw over a folder from Claude and go, "Hey, can you like fix this and make it so that I can use it on ChatGPT?" Is that Is that kind of how it is?

[00:05:54]>> Yeah, really yeah. NEAR is the most native one that you can just like really build anything. You can You can use You can build with our SDKs in Rust and TypeScript. We used to support AssemblyScript or AssemblyScript, same thing.

[00:06:08]Um you know, we even have support for Kotlin and Go and all that type of thing. So, it's it's there's a big breadth of of developer support.

[00:06:18]>> So, I've been getting a lot of VCs contacting me recently and they all ask me the same thing, like why now? Like why is NEAR all of a sudden so interesting and why is it getting so much attention?

[00:06:28]What What do you have to answer to them?

[00:06:30]Like why Why is everybody on NEAR right now?

[00:06:33]>> I mean, that's a great question. I don't know how it exactly came so popular so fast. It may have been I mean, I know that Venice VVB had a massive influx of uh of uh uh volume going on trading on it. And Venice, I know does leverage our NEAR private inference. These uh uh uh >> right?

[00:06:55]>> Yeah, it is. We've I think been pushing it since September of last year.

[00:06:59]Um but I know that we do support Venice as well as Brave with these uh private inference models, but I'm not sure if that's what made it come to the forefront. We have had some a product called NEAR Intents, which was if you remember the Zcash rally from last year, NEAR Intents was probably the one that unlocked that for everybody cuz Zcash wasn't exactly You couldn't buy that on on most exchanges, but through NEAR Intents, which is you can try it out at near.com, you're able to transact and do this support from chains that otherwise don't have that support.

[00:07:34]>> What do you mean by that? Like is it just we we aggregate trading from any network? I I understand. How does that work on near.com?

[00:07:42]>> Yeah, so intents, which is this kind of like new type of architec- architecture, you essentially say, "I want to do this."

[00:07:52]And you send it to this network of uh of solvers, and these solvers essentially have to figure it out. They all kind of bid on, "Oh, I could I could do that for this amount." Um we could say that is I want to swap Bitcoin into Ethereum, and those are two native assets.

[00:08:09]Historically, that's pretty impossible to swap to swap or to bridge across, especially in under a minute. Um yeah, so on NEAR intents, you just say, "I want to swap this amount of Bitcoin into Ethereum."

[00:08:21]And then uh our solver network takes that in, it finds the best possible route uh using liquidity across these solvers. Like, maybe it's uh one solver says, "Okay, I can swap that Bitcoin into Stellar." And then it says, "Oh, because I have a pathway that I can easily swap Stellar into Ethereum." And so we find that best possible route um through that to fulfill that intent.

[00:08:47]>> And that's just better than using a regular bridge where you just plug and play the asset. What Why is it better?

[00:08:54]>> It's better because you've probably experienced I mean >> Yeah.

[00:08:57]>> You've probably experienced a lot of swapping maybe on Uniswap or others that is uh it's all kind of locked into the Ethereum ecosystem. You've always been able to like, you know, swap across those type of chains, no problem. But, you know, when you're introducing these other L1s like native Bitcoin or Zcash, which aren't built on uh Ethereum, then it gets difficult. Maybe you do have to do a bridge where I mean, I remember having to bridge for 8 hours in order to change, you know, just to go from NEAR into Ethereum. And then after that 8 hours comes, now I got to figure out, "Okay, I I I'll go on a website to grab my Ethereum and set up a a peer-to-peer transaction to buy Bitcoin or something like that. And then I have to like send directly to that and all this, which is just a ton of industry knowledge and a lot of like friction and all that. And NEAR just automates it all away.

[00:09:51]>> So so tell me like while you were studying in school and looking into Ethereum, looking into the developments on NEAR, what did you see in NEAR early that made you decide to to stay and see it play out?

[00:10:03]>> I didn't really come into this space off of investment or or even uh DeFi or any of this type of thing. You know, I came off of I came into it based on utility and what made sense to me and where I thought the industry was coming industry was going. I worked for 3 years in a fund accounting at a major bank and I kind of like looked at it and I thought, well, this kind of sounds like a blockchain, you know, and I think that blockchains do this a whole lot more efficiently. And then if I were to go and look at, all right, what blockchain do I want to build on? Well, this one has the best developer experience. I can write in normal languages I'm familiar with like Rust or AssemblyScript like TypeScript type language. Um so that's what really gravitated me to NEAR.

[00:10:53]Just kind of the practicality of it all, I thought.

[00:10:55]>> Yeah, fair enough.

[00:10:56]Uh one of the recent developments that happened I saw this like hockey stick chart. Hockey stick means it's just going zoom zoom.

[00:11:02]>> [laughter] >> And from my POV, it was it was like the TVL for this thing called confidentiality, right? For intents.

[00:11:11]And apparently that's like what everybody keeps talking about. Everybody keeps talking about Zcash being the place to shield your money and then NEAR being the place to move your money privately.

[00:11:23]When when did that start happening?

[00:11:27]>> I think that all started uh Oh man, I could pull that up. I know that uh Um you asked earlier about weekly transactions. I guess we're at 6.11 million.

[00:11:39]Almost 700k weekly active addresses, but the one that I wanted to take a look at here is this Dune dashboard for Near Intent.

[00:11:48]So, Near Intent's confidential TVL.

[00:11:52]Oh, man.

[00:11:56]It's currently at 18 million.

[00:12:00]And uh you know, we just released that at Nearcon back in February.

[00:12:05]Uh and yeah, it's it's Now we've been rolling it out to our partners that integrate Near Intent. A lot of some DEXes that you may be familiar with like I believe uh ThorSwap in integrates Near Intent as well. As as these have been integrating confidential intents on their back end, um this this number has been going straight up.

[00:12:27]>> And can you talk to us about the total generated fees? Is any of that going back to the Near token itself?

[00:12:34]>> Yeah, and you can check that all out yourself at revenue.near.org.

[00:12:39]And uh yeah, so total fees to date is 22.78 million Near, which is probably about 60 million dollars.

[00:12:49]And all that um goes back into buying the token.

[00:12:55]>> All of it? Like 100%?

[00:12:58]>> I don't know. Don't hold me to that.

[00:13:01]>> [laughter] >> I'm not >> Fair enough. Fair enough.

[00:13:03]>> 100% sure, but I know I could pull that up. Yeah, fees are used for buybacks and burns. I don't I don't know the the uh the percentage of that, but a a good deal of that.

[00:13:14]>> Yeah, I I I mean, I'm sure you understand the tokenomics. I I have no idea if most of the tokens have been unlocked for Near. I imagine it's been it's been around for a while, so How How do How do the tokenomics on Near work?

[00:13:26]>> Uh man, I'm not the best person to ask about that, but I do know that we are fully unlocked, at least I mean don't hold me to that, but I'm pretty sure that we are mostly all unlocked.

[00:13:36]Um and yeah, through this fees generated, we're approaching being deflationary as a token.

[00:13:43]I believe that that number for being deflationary is uh $177 million in daily intense volume, and yesterday we had $110 in volume.

[00:13:58]>> And how much did you have a month ago?

[00:14:00]>> Uh >> In daily volume.

[00:14:02]>> A month ago in daily volume, let's check it out.

[00:14:06]Um that's daily volume by asset near and dense. This is daily confidential TVL right here.

[00:14:14]So, that's been cranking up since February.

[00:14:20]>> So, the DEXs are using it, got it.

[00:14:24]>> Near intense activity.

[00:14:26]Yeah, we did. We had a very very when we first released it, we had a very active December and January.

[00:14:36]>> December and January, interesting.

[00:14:38]>> And then this is >> Cuz this token did nothing on December.

[00:14:40]December January did nothing, absolutely nothing.

[00:14:43]>> That's that's the surprising thing. Is I mean historically we have had uh we have had emissions that got cut from 5% to 2.5% and that happened around that time. We really needed that emissions cut, which is essentially like the rewards that go out to validators that are staked inside that ecosystem. So, we cut that and in doing so, that's kind of led to a lot of the activity that that we're seeing today.

[00:15:13]>> Yeah, kind of like a pseudo halving in a way.

[00:15:16]>> [laughter] >> You guys did a halving.

[00:15:17]>> Yeah, yeah, in a way to halving.

[00:15:20]>> Yeah.

[00:15:21]Okay, that's fair enough. Okay, so like let's say someone buys and holds near, what what can they like practically do with it besides just hold it?

[00:15:31]>> Um you can swap on near intense to any asset that you want. So if you are looking for more exposure into other ecosystems, all you need is just your near account and you can start transacting on all those with that near.

[00:15:45]You don't have to start thinking about the other ecosystems there.

[00:15:48]We also have a leading popular decks called Raya Finance. On there you can do lending and borrowing.

[00:15:55]Um and the same type of swapping. I also think uh it's worth noting that Raya did get hacked recently, but uh all of the funds were recovered. The the near team worked day and night uh to get all this back and I don't think that there was during the all those hacks that happened around when Mythos was released and everybody was scared about DeFi and what was happening. Uh yeah, I think that near was really the only one that was able to fully recover all the funds.

[00:16:26]>> Was it just like luck?

[00:16:28]You just got lucky that Lazarus wasn't around, North Korea wasn't knocking or >> Maybe. I mean >> or like what what was it?

[00:16:36]>> So if I remember the hack, it uh they they essentially abused an oracle and from that oracle they were able to like extract all this Zcash that was lended on the Raya platform and then they used confidential intense to like siphon it all away. So they used our own product to be able to like obscure and obfuscate, you know, where all these funds were going.

[00:17:03]Um but uh we've got a team of incredibly smart smart people that were able to find and track and and go through and I and essentially identify the uh addresses and who own them and then reaching out to them directly to hey, we know exactly who you are.

[00:17:23]Um, we will report you to the authorities.

[00:17:25]We'll give you 24 hours to return the funds.

[00:17:27]>> Okay, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, for context, I think last month it was it was Drift on Solana was the the biggest I don't know what it was like liquidity providing platform. I forgot what it was. It [snorts] was over 200 million dollars and the other one was Kelp DAO, which was also like another 200 to 400 million dollars. It was bad. A lot of people were getting hacked at the same time, but you know, good thing you guys came out of it pretty strong. Okay, so it seems mostly like the Zcash narrative alongside with intense is big.

[00:17:53]So so why is it under the the AI category then? Is it Is it AI agents?

[00:17:59]Like what's the focus now?

[00:18:00]>> So Near AI, that kind of goes back to the full story of Near, which is this that Near AI Near started as Near AI back in 2017 and that came from the founder, one of the co-founders, Illia Polosukhin, um, who you may have heard of this paper called Attention Is All You Need, which is uh essentially the paper that described the transformer architecture, which is what unlocked, you know, stuff like ChatGPT and all the AI the generative AI models that we're seeing today So Illia at his time at Google, he teamed uh he, you know, worked on that paper, published it, did the work with TensorFlow, which is also really like important technical work in the field of AI and he uh after he left and he kind of pursued this this vision of of Near AI, he teamed up with this guy from Microsoft named Alex Skidanov and they were working on how to train a model, how to build these like generative UIs. There's actually a really cool demo out there from 2017 of using like their small little AI models to generate a front-end UI in front of them. But yeah, so so they were trying to essentially train a model and they needed to process payments internationally in order to do that and they kind of they were reaching a lot of friction with paying with international payments and then they were also kind of like looking forward at like what is the future of AI and how does blockchain fit into it? And so they pivoted while the AI space was still young, they pivoted into building a blockchain and they went out they set forth to build the best blockchain ever, which I think that they did do.

[00:19:51]So that went live in 2020, it went live on mainnet.

[00:19:56]It has had 100% uptime since.

[00:20:00]That's also something that other blockchains can't necessarily say the same. And now we're 6 years after 2020 and we're pivoting back into the original vision of Near AI.

[00:20:11]Um so we've been focusing on this thing called private inference, which is where you deploy LLM models into these TEEs, trusted execution environments, which essentially means that you can like verify what happens inside of that environment and you can verify for example that nothing aside from the LLM is reading your data or is selling it off to other cloud providers or something like that.

[00:20:39]Um so that's been private inference which you see with Venice AI and Brave and then also Iron Claw, which is just like secure agent operating system. So it's kind of like Open Claw but much more secure and more robust.

[00:20:56]And we've been kind of spinning that up.

[00:20:58]So yeah, these these Iron Claw agents that are able to securely do AI tasks um, and you're able to talk to LLM's privately.

[00:21:10]And then tie it all back to the blockchain, which is that this is all happening inside of verifiable execution environments.

[00:21:18]And you can essentially tie, uh, the blockchain to execute these transactions and talk to these backend services and know that they're going to reply and do the exact code that they wanted. So, you can build these like super powerful applications.

[00:21:33]>> Very interesting. So, Open Claw, I isn't that isn't that open source? They're They're not selling our data, right? Are Are they?

[00:21:40]>> I mean, I'm not going to say anything about Open Claw. I don't think that they're selling our data, but definitely, um, I mean, you could be using skills that are inside of this, like, tools that the agent itself is using. And maybe in using those skills, you provide some information or it downloads something with root access that does go and grab some things.

[00:22:00]There's just a little bit of a It's more of like a a wild west, I guess, with Open Claw.

[00:22:04]>> Ooh, so okay, so with Iron Claw, what I I don't use the frontier models then? Cuz if I'm using a frontier model, aren't they gathering my data anyway?

[00:22:15]>> Uh, yeah, I mean, so we do do one thing with on private inference, which is called anonymized models. So, where we do pull in and deploy these frontier blockchain models, but, um, we just don't tie it to you and your conversation. So, we're able to still support those frontier models, but any information that you give to it or you talk about it will not be tied to you.

[00:22:38]We're we we completely sever that connection.

[00:22:42]>> Ooh, that's really interesting. So, it's kind of like, uh, like a mixer, like Tornado Cash, but with AI models? Is that Is that the way to to explain it in a way?

[00:22:56]Well, okay, we we we're like we don't like Tornado Cash. They're bad people or whatever. They're good people. I don't really care, but the the point is that you're kind of mixing along and you can't really know who exactly is the guy on top of the model. Okay, that's that's interesting. I didn't know that mattered. Like I I didn't know like if I was using Opus 4.8, for example, they could tie it back to my user ID. Is Is that a thing? I thought it was just the data they were collecting.

[00:23:22]>> You have uh I mean, I'm not well versed in their terms of service and their privacy policy, but uh you you do have an API key that is tied to your um >> True.

[00:23:35]>> personal information. And, you know, some of these while I think that most of these have promised not to sell ads, I don't >> crazy to think that maybe there could be some things that are hooked into this whole process that does pull out this data and a a light association with you and who your persona is. Um Yeah, that so that they can sell you different products or maybe uh give that information to the authorities or >> I didn't think about that at all. Like I was thinking like we were in a in a Google world, but like Google sells our data anytime we're searching for anything. You go to Amazon, they're they're selling your data. They're all selling your data because they want to target advertisers.

[00:24:16]That's how they make money. So, that makes so much sense, actually. Uh they probably are selling our our data under the hood and they can connect to us through the API keys. That's genius. And so, we are able to circumvent that through anonymized on Iron Claw right now. Um is it only using Open Claw or or can we like plug it into the Hermes agents? Cuz I know a lot of guys prefer Hermes over Open Claw.

[00:24:39]>> I So, I want to uh correct one thing.

[00:24:41]It's just that you can do private inference on Near AI Cloud. That's our private cloud where we host these models. Iron Claw is our own agent that we built. So, it's our own like competitor to Open Claw or Hermes.

[00:24:54]>> What does it do better other than the anonymize?

[00:24:57]>> Um, it focuses on security and it like uh tracks where let's say that you are downloading skills or using tools, it you know, doesn't give it root access to your computer. It if you are like uh doing something uh I don't know, conversing and you have to give an API key or you're giving private data in these conversations, we actually like check in the sandbox, okay, there's a request going out that has the sensitive data, let's clear it out and make sure that it doesn't come out of this environment. Um >> The way I've been able to circumvent that with with at least how I use codex is I tell it to generate a dot in ENV file cuz apparently that's supposed to like help with privacy and then I manually like paste it. Am I doing it wrong?

[00:25:42]>> [laughter] >> Is that right?

[00:25:44]Okay.

[00:25:45]But you could literally just paste it in the chat and and it it'll be the same thing.

[00:25:49]On Iron Claw.

[00:25:51]>> Uh I think I think something to think about here too is okay, sure, you're using cursor or codex or something like that and you do have you have some secrets in your dot ENV.

[00:26:02]Uh I've definitely had conversations with a AI coding agent and it's like, hey, can I look at the dot ENV? And then sure, you approve it, it looks at it all, you know, it's reading all that into that context and it might include API keys that are even not the ones that you necessarily need. Um I don't think that they're doing anything with that, but that means that that has those that dot ENV has been transmitted somewhere else, you know, it's processing has happened on it that wasn't occurring locally and so you could be leaking information.

[00:26:38]>> We don't know, but it could happen and given they're centralized AI companies that need to raise capital desperately, it's possible they could eventually sell your data. Okay, that's that's very interesting. Okay, so you're going through through privacy angle. So I'm assuming you're very intertwined with Zcash. I mean, they're the leader of the privacy narrative right now. Is the goal to just be the king of helping route all the Zcash transactions? Is like is that like the big play?

[00:27:03]>> Uh maybe. I mean, I think I think the big play is this is really this uh this focus on privacy privacy and confidentiality.

[00:27:13]Uh you know, historically with blockchains, they've been a bit unpopular because uh everything is public. You any transaction that you do is public. And let's say you are managing a fund or something like that. You maybe don't want everybody to know what you're buying and selling all the time. And so, blockchain has been less attractive for that. But with confidential intents, that changes things. You can now, you know, do uh you can have a transaction history. You can maybe book personal flights pattern like your your essentially like telling information about like where you're going and what you're buying and what it is. And that's uh and this can all be kept private.

[00:27:55]Um which unlocks a whole round a whole world of possibilities in the web three space that hasn't historically been >> Yeah. Yeah, one of the big problems with blockchain is if I want to buy a coffee, I shouldn't have to expose my wallet address. Like I buy a $5 coffee, they look into my Chase checking account. It doesn't make any sense. And and that's why nobody's really adopted it. Like why would I use a crypto account when I can just use my Chase and even now I crypto native, I do the same thing.

[00:28:23]So, it makes a lot of sense. And so, okay. So, let me let me see if I gather the knowledge for all of us maybe less technical. So, intents is like we are getting a bunch of people with I'm assuming like AI models or some kind of model that can aggregate whatever transaction I need. So, like if I need something to go to A to B like Bitcoin to Ethereum natively, I can find the most efficient way through intense, apparently, right?

[00:28:50]Yeah, right. Yeah.

[00:28:53]Network solvers.

[00:28:54]Okay, and then it's confidential, so is it because like they're like throwing the funds all over the place or like how how is it confidential?

[00:29:02]>> Because we actually process this on a private shard. So, we we have we have like a You can think of it as like a node or group of nodes on our blockchain that are completely disconnected while disconnected from the rest of the blockchain and require a private key, your private key, in order to actually view your transaction history.

[00:29:24]>> Okay, that's that's interesting. Okay, and and these validators, we trust them?

[00:29:30]Are they random people?

[00:29:32]>> Uh yeah, we trust them.

[00:29:34]I don't know who they are, but uh >> We trust them. Okay, that's fair.

[00:29:39]Because they don't get access to the private keys anyway. They're just saying this is cool and this is not.

[00:29:43]>> Yeah, exactly. I think uh Come to think of it, like I don't think that they I think you can cryptographically prove that even they do not have access or exposure into that history.

[00:29:55]>> Yeah, yeah. I mean, I run I ran validators a while ago and we just said this is cool or this isn't cool and we would get rewarded based on that. But remember, that was like years ago.

[00:30:03]That was boomer tech at this point. It's been stone age. Okay, that's very cool.

[00:30:08]Okay, so I guess the last things I'd like to ask is I mean, you're at the NEAR Foundation, what's coming next?

[00:30:13]What's the big focus right now other than I'm assuming Iron Claw?

[00:30:16]>> Uh yeah, you know, we're working a lot on Iron Claw.

[00:30:21]This we're still, you know, focusing heavily on private inference and finding, you know, partners and use cases that will use make the most of private inference. Like, for example, something that we maybe don't think about is that you maybe need to have compliance. Like, you know, like patient user confident or patient doctor confidentiality like that type of thing like these type of applications that you want to use AI in but you probably shouldn't be leaking all this information in. So we're kind of looking for partners there to build out applications that use this and then yeah we're going heavy into confidential intense. So uh we're finding ways to integrate them into you know leading DEX's into typical you know products like payment products that you might be familiar with that we see around you know uh uh into other financial software as a services. Anything that can benefit from programmable money which is like the great thing about blockchain. Anything that can benefit from from programmable money but needs confidentiality.

[00:31:30]>> That's fair. So you're you're not saying you're you're the best of the best.

[00:31:33]You're saying we're the most secure right now and if you need security which if you're doing a crypto Visa card you definitely need then you should probably come to us.

[00:31:40]>> For sure. Yes, we're we're really doubling down on security and privacy.

[00:31:45]>> Yeah, I mean that's the big narrative and I mean what would you say is the like the fairest criticism of of NEAR or blockchain right now for anybody looking into it but is like I don't trust crypto. I think crypto sucks.

[00:31:57]>> Yeah. Oh for crypto hmm.

[00:32:00]>> I cuz I mean I guess like it would be the same question.

[00:32:04]>> Yeah [laughter] no I I agree.

[00:32:05]>> Yeah pretty much.

[00:32:06]>> NEAR is everything. Yeah.

[00:32:08]Uh Yeah, I think uh a fair criticism is definitely that like you know you can do all of this but you can you can do a lot of this but process by a single company you know Visa and MasterCard could just be the payment processors that handle all this.

[00:32:24]But you're really uh centralizing all that and you're you know they are you're essentially custodying your money and funds elsewhere rather than actually provably owning the funds yourself.

[00:32:39]So, while it's not necessarily a problem now, maybe in 5 to 10 years or down the road, you know, once you get that captured that market capture, you can just like crank up the fees or I don't know, just do nefarious things. I don't I I don't really know. Um but I also want to say about NEAR, a fair criticism I think historically has been that the the narrative has changed a lot. You know, I feel like that comes up anytime that I talk to somebody about NEAR when they hear about it. It's like, "Oh, is that the one weren't you guys an AI like a AI company and then you guys did chain signatures and then what was the blockchain operating system about?"

[00:33:15]And now you guys are back to AI and all that type of thing.

[00:33:18]NEAR has always changed its narrative, um but in my opinion, that's because NEAR has really just been kind of a first mover and maybe ahead of its time, honestly. And and the rest of the industry has has had to catch up.

[00:33:32]>> I'm the king of being a flip-flopper. I I go from narrative to narrative every 5 seconds. I mean, if you've been in crypto full-time for 5 years and you haven't shifted narratives, I don't know what industry you're in, quite frankly.

[00:33:43]Okay, cool. And and so what was like the prior narrative for NEAR?

[00:33:48]>> Um I think before this one, it was probably chain abstraction was the big focus. And that's that's what led to NEAR intense.

[00:33:56]The idea that you don't really have to worry about what's going on under the hood. It's just you just say what you want and the rest is handled.

[00:34:04]>> And what do you say to the people that are like, "Oh, you should just focus on one thing and pour your resources into it and try not to be like a jack of all trades. You keep shifting narratives, you lose your edge." What do you say to those guys?

[00:34:14]>> I think I would say that uh you've been heard and you know, we're actually we're actually trying really hard at doing that now.

[00:34:23]>> Respect. Respect. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the channel, Elliot.

[00:34:27]Where can people find you if they want to learn more about NEAR and you?

[00:34:30]>> Sure. Uh follow me on Twitter. Uh you can find me at Elliot, e l l i o t, underscore braem, b r a e m, as in Mary.

[00:34:39]Uh, that's mostly where I'm most active.

[00:34:41]Give me a follow. Feel free to DM. I'm happy to talk more.

[00:34:45]>> Fair enough. Thank you so much for hopping on.

[00:34:47]>> Yeah, thank you thank you, too.

[00:34:49]>> Yeah.

[00:34:49]>> It was a great. Bye.