NEAR Protocol Outlines 2026 Roadmap Focused on Intents, AI, and the Next Growth Cycle

• NEAR Protocol sets 2026 priorities around AI-Intents convergence, user-owned AI, and expanding NEAR Intents into a top trading platform.
• The protocol hit 1 million TPS, added three shards, and launched AI Cloud tools already serving over 100M users across multiple platforms.

NEAR Protocol has published its roadmap for 2026, signaling a shift toward artificial intelligence, decentralized trading, and broader protocol adoption. The Layer 1 blockchain aims to grow NEAR Intents into a leading venue for on-chain transactions, expand its AI efforts, and position $NEAR as a core digital asset in the evolving crypto economy. The announcement followed a high-performance year in 2025, which NEAR described as its transition to real-world scale. The protocol reached a major technical benchmark, hitting one million transactions per second (TPS) in a public test using live core code and accessible hardware.

NEAR’s strategic priorities for 2026:

✦ Grow NEAR Intents into top trading venue in crypto
✦ Expand NEAR AI to enable AI-Intents convergence
✦ Position $NEAR at the center of the next growth era
✦ Ensure the AI economy is user-owned

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) January 1, 2026

According to NEAR, this proves the viability of sharded blockchain architecture in supporting high-load decentralized applications. In 2025, NEAR scaled its mainnet infrastructure from six to nine shards, raising throughput by 50%. With dynamic resharding now active, the network can adjust its structure as demand increases. This offers a route to horizontal scalability without disrupting application performance. “Sharding lets us scale execution across Intents,” NEAR posted, emphasizing the ability to handle higher transaction volumes. The network’s flexibility is crucial to its broader plans to serve as the base layer for AI and intent-based transactions. As CNF outlined, NEAR’s infrastructure upgrades come as rival networks like Polygon continue to evolve their zkEVM architecture and cross-chain tooling. NEAR’s AI Cloud and Privacy-Preserving Tools Go Live The NEAR Foundation introduced two key products, as reported by CNF: NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat, which enhance AI interaction while protecting user data. These tools are designed around the principle of verifiable privacy, meaning user inputs and outputs are cryptographically protected and owned by the user. Both tools are already integrated into Brave Nightly, OpenMind AGI, and Phala Network applications, reaching over 100 million users. They run on hardware-backed encryption, offering an alternative to centralized AI systems. As NEAR stated, “Users should own their interactions with AI.” The move positions NEAR to support both the privacy and usability demands of decentralized AI products. Alongside technical progress, NEAR is exploring a new governance model called the “House of Stake.” This system will blend community participation with support from intelligent digital agents capable of representing user intent. The protocol claims this structure moves beyond binary voting by enabling more context-aware decision-making. The 2026 roadmap release and a gradual market upturn in recent days have boosted the NEAR price. In the last 24 hours, the NEAR price was trading over 8% higher from its intraday low at $1.63.