Author: Stacy Muur, Crypto KOL

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

The year 2024 is shaping up to be a great year for NEAR Protocol, both in terms of fundamentals and sentiment.

NEAR currently has:

• 44 million monthly active accounts, up from 7 million a year ago
• Daily transaction volume exceeding 8 million, double that of the beginning of the year (average fee of $0.002)

NEAR also boasts the four applications with the highest number of monthly active users in all of Web3:

• KAIKAI: 31.7 million monthly active users
• Here Wallet: 4.2 million monthly active users
• Sweat Economy: 1.6 million monthly active users
• Playember: 500,000 monthly active users

Additionally, $700 million worth of stablecoins have flowed into the NEAR ecosystem, a 20-fold year-on-year increase.

In May, the issuance of NEAR's native stablecoin reached a historic high of $760 million; at the same time, DeFi TVL grew fivefold, from $88 million to $430 million.

NEAR Protocol has introduced several important upgrades and releases:

Nightshade 2.0: NEAR is currently running 6 active shards, with capacity increased by 50% since the beginning of the year, and plans to expand to 8 shards in the first quarter of this year.

Accelerator Program: The foundation has successfully launched three accelerator programs, two focused on AI and one on Chain Abstraction. These teams have collectively raised $50.5 million in funding.

NEAR is now fully compatible with MetaMask, Phantom, and other ETH wallets.

Chain Signatures have been launched on the NEAR mainnet, enabling smart contracts to sign any blockchain transaction. This solidifies NEAR's position in the field of Chain Abstraction.

Intent, as a new type of transaction, has been launched on NEAR, allowing the exchange of information, requests, assets, and operations between AI agents, services, and end users.

In May, the NEAR Foundation announced a focus on user-owned AI.

In November, NEAR launched NEAR AI, a research center for the public development of a 14 trillion parameter model. This center features a user-owned AI assistant capable of acting on behalf of users in Web2 and Web3 by connecting with other AI agents and services.

(Related reading: In-depth Analysis of NEAR AI: Shaping the Most Powerful Open Source AI Platform Owned by Users)

The NEAR AI ecosystem currently has over 50 AI teams dedicated to research, infrastructure, data and storage, models, and applications.

The momentum of "AI is NEAR" is gradually increasing:

• Eliza is using NEAR Intent to execute multi-chain swaps on ai16z
• NEAR AI and Frax Finance are collaborating to build fully autonomous agents utilizing NEAR infrastructure
• Sweat Economy is integrating AI assistants into their wallet UI

In 2025, NEAR may focus on AI, which could earn NEAR Protocol the title of "AI Blockchain."

Related reading: Interpreting NEAR: Following Hot Narratives or Leading the Market?

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