NEAR Foundation Partners with NEAT Protocol to Accelerate the Growth of AI Applications with 1 million $NEAR Delegation

NEAR Foundation announces today that NEAT, a rollup protocol designed for scaling AI applications on NEAR, has received 1 million $NEAR token staking delegation from NEAR Foundation. All NEAR token rewards from the delegation will be redistributed to $NEAT stakers, producing approximately 120-200% APY. This funding is part of NEAR Foundation’s efforts to support AI and blockchain projects on NEAR, and to promote use cases of AI integration with blockchain technology more broadly. NEAT, as the first rollup scaling protocol to receive official support from the NEAR Foundation, will utilize these funds to attract a wider user base to its ecosystem.

NEAT is a rollup scaling solution built on the NEAR inscription standard, specifically designed to facilitate AI and machine-learning applications on NEAR. NEAT offers an innovative approach for rollups to be built on NEAR. With off-chain indexer nodes for execution and NEAR L1 as the data availability layer, NEAT eliminates the need for rollups to deploy smart contracts or run verification logic on the L1. This streamlined process drastically reduces transaction costs for rollups, making NEAT particularly well suited for computationally intensive applications such as AI and gaming. Additionally, NEAR Catalog, powered by NEAT, is currently developing an advanced indexer that aims to provide projects and applications in the NEAR ecosystem with cost-effective and flexible indexing and querying capabilities.

NEAT Token and Benefits

The $NEAT token exists in two forms, NRC-20 and NEP-141, with a total supply of 42 million tokens. $NEAT tokens offers the following benefits:

1. Stakers of $NEAT-NEP141 will receive the staking rewards generated from the 1 million $NEAR tokens provided by the Foundation. A portion of these staking rewards will also be allocated to support the exploration of AI integration with NEAT.

2. $NEAT-NEP141 stakers will receive a share of the fees generated from wrap/unwrap operations (currently set at 1% fee rate) and a portion of the fees from the NRC-20 marketplace.

3. After the decentralized indexer is operational, a portion of the indexing fees will be distributed to $NEAT-NEP141 stakers.

4. Holders of $NEAT-NRC20 tokens will be eligible to receive airdrops of newly minted NRC-20 tokens.

5. $NEAT serves as a utility token within the NEAT ecosystem, enabling services/assets payments, DeFi integration, AI governance, and more.

The Road Ahead: Revolutionizing AI with Decentralized Indexing

NEAT is building the first fully customizable decentralized indexer network, which allows any project to easily store data on the NEAR blockchain, deploy custom indexing logic on a decentralized set of indexer nodes, and achieve verifiable execution through zero-knowledge proofs. This approach aims to address potential failure points and attack vectors associated with centralized indexers.

One of the most exciting use cases for decentralized indexing is in the field of artificial intelligence. With NRC-20 and NEAT Indexers, it becomes possible to store AI data, parameters, algorithms, models, and outputs as on-chain inscriptions and integrate them with off-chain execution through zero-knowledge proofs. For instance, one can imagine creating fully open-source AI-powered games, where users participate in shaping the game’s narrative, and the history is permanently stored on-chain through inscriptions. AI agents’ models, parameters, and decisions can be represented as inscribed NFTs, and their training and model parameters can be stored on-chain.

This combination of blockchain transparency and off-chain computational efficiency allows AI to be truly accessible and open to everyone, contributing to the development of a genuinely open network.