28 Reasons Why 2026 is the Year of NEAR

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   Good morning, Legion. Last week we dropped a video on the weekend called 28 Reasons to Be Bullish on NEAR in 2026. In this video, we'll provide a SparkNotes version of that thesis simply by listing all 28 reasons sequentially so that you can quickly and easily understand the scope of our new thesis on year.

2. 0:18

   So, without further ado, 28 Reasons to Be Bullish on NEAR 2026: The SparkNotes version. Part one was on NEAR fundamentals the team, the token, and the blockchain. Reason one NEAR is now a VC free token. All of the VC sales from 3 to 4 years ago are completed.

3. 0:34

   The NEAR token is fully unlocked with no further locked tokens waiting to be dumped on the market. Reason number two, the NEAR halving in 2025 has cut protocol inflation in half, leading to a better long term tokenomics structure and annual inflation of only 2.5%.

4. 0:49

   This means is more demand for NEAR grows around AI and Intents less NEAR as paid out for economic security. Reason number three the NEAR team has been building for five years and none of them have quit by expensive mansions, helicopters, or low life gluttony purchases.

5. 1:04

   Reason number four the NEAR Ecosystem Treasury remains fully intact and has not been looted over the past five years. This remains an essential growth vector for NEAR awaiting prime time for when NEAR AI is sufficiently mature and ready to scale.

6. 1:18

   Reason number five the NEAR account model remains the most advanced account model in crypto, including sub accounts, function call limited permissions, gas extraction, MPC integration and direct access to NEAR intents. Reason number six NEAR is one of the most scalable L1s, if not the most scalable, with nine shards live.

7. 1:36

   Bowen Wang has a plan to take it to 100 shards. Sharding is a prerequisite for the agentic internet and the growth of the universal liquidity layer. There is no scalability cap for NEAR and no scenario where transactions become horribly expensive like on Ethereum.

8. 1:51

   NEAR’s sharding design is being implemented. Roadmap of ETH 2.0 that everyone stopped talking about long ago. It's here, it's live, and it works. Part two is focused on NEAR intents. Reason number seven NEAR Intents, grew from 0 to $8 billion in total volume in one year.

9. 2:07

   This is one of the first products on your to find serious product market fit. And it's only going to keep growing as a universal liquidity layer into the future, integrating not only crypto assets, but real world assets, stocks, tokenized commodities, and even actions for agentic agents.

10. 2:23

    Reason number eight NEAR intents volume and activity is going to be tied into the NEAR token, most likely in a growth focused mechanic by which more people are incentivized to hold NEAR as they use NEAR intents. Reason number nine it's only going to get easier to use NEAR intents over time.

11. 2:37

    Better consumer focus, more assets listed, more volume, more marketing and publicity, more incentives to use the product. NEAR intents has made the jump from 0 to 1, and now benefits from a number of tailwinds. And the future is very bright for this product and yours as a whole. Part three is focused on privacy.

12. 2:55

    Reason number ten NEAR is the most important privacy coin in crypto, because NEAR has enabled simple and universal access to Zcash through NEAR intents. NEAR is in the Holy Trinity of privacy has been selected as the most important privacy crypto of 2025 by the rollup and will continue to build out its privacy preserving components through its AI products.

13. 3:15

    Reason number 11 privacy is a moat in the eyes of A16z will only get stronger over time and will remain important in the future. NEAR is attacking privacy both from the financial side as well as from a first principles approach in their design of private AI, chat and private cloud.

14. 3:31

    Reason number 12 private cloud offers a unique value proposition that currently does not exist anywhere else on the market. Verifiable private intelligence for B2B firms. It's not on the promise as AWS Nitro is, but rather fully verifiable and only dependent on code.

15. 3:48

    Part four NEAR AI. Reason number 13. NEAR is the most advanced product in the world, building verifiable encrypted intelligence that includes universal access to compute compute power, a technology stack for building encrypted AI models, agents, memory and training.

16. 4:04

    A universal liquidity layer for that AI to transact with other AI upon universally accessible AI governance On chain via the house of stake and safe ownership of AI via the NEAR account model. Reason number 14 NEAR is the number two AI token, barely behind TAO, but fundamentally NEAR is much better organized economically for building user owned AI.

17. 4:26

    Reason number 15 Illia is the coauthor of Attention is All You Need and a Visionary Founder for bringing his vision of user owned AI to life. The NEAR team is relentless and has maintained its core engineering talent from the very beginning.

18. 4:38

    Reason number 16 NEAR has a very advanced form of decentralized governance in the house of stake that is critical for scaling up autonomous AI agents, as well as intents and MPC incentives in the long term. Reason number 17 NEAR AI is led by Bown Wang and George Zeng, two big brains who have never stopped shipping and think out problems from first principles.

19. 4:59

    Reason number 18 AI and crypto are well positioned for a huge 2026, with x402 and agentic commerce predicted to grow significantly, and firms like A16z looking at the specific interactions between crypto and AI. Reason number 19.

20. 5:15

    Illia’s vision of DCML remains unique and largely untouched by both Western and Eastern AI teams, focused mainly on models and intelligence over ownership and privacy. Reason number 20 we're still so early on in the build out of the agenntic internet.

21. 5:29

    The next ten years will see massive amounts of investment capital and new users to AI products. There will be millions of agents in the coming five years. They will need rails to transact and to express intent and NEAR is already life.

22. 5:42

    Reason number 21 AI induced unemployment is going to increase in the coming years, and NEAR will offer a home and an alternative through private user-owned AI that can be monetized for and by you. Reason number 22 AI is the most important industry in the history of humanity, and NEAR is the only company building encrypted AI from GPUs through transactions.

23. 6:02

    It's expected to hit a $4.8 trillion valuation by 2033. Reason number 23 Sovereign AI, the Digital Asset Treasury, is a team of Giga Chads who will continue to fund raising by NEAR token on top of positioning your compute for real world AI usage.

24. 6:19

    NEAR will grow on Wall Street via ETFs or indirectly from Sovereign reason number 24. Not a single frontier model is offered with verifiable privacy by default, meaning the best option to use your has is to opt out from future training data.

25. 6:33

    Not only can the model read your messages, but your messages are also available for legal cases, advertising and future model training. You get to use AI, but you don't own your own chat histories. Reason number 25 Demis Hassabis, Google's DeepMind CEO, is quoted as saying that he described a near future within three years where there are billions of AI agents negotiating with each other on behalf of the vendor and the customer.

26. 6:58

    And he said it would require a rethinking of the web itself. Reason number 26 after the agents comes the machines. Goldman thinks they'll be 1.4 million humanoid robots by 2035, with a market cap of $38 billion. Morgan Stanley says 1 billion by 2050, powering a $5 trillion market, with some forecasting projecting up to 300 million humanoid robots in China alone by 2045.

27. 7:23

    Closing points. The last two here are really just the cherry on top, folks. Reason 27 the NEAR Legion is hosting ten events this month and is organizing globally to take NEAR the streets, the classroom, and the crypto meetups around the world.

28. 7:37

    With the Legion NEAR has its own army similar to XRP Army and Link Marines, and it can build an organic community cult around the vision of encrypted intelligence. Reason number 28 NEAR position to win from the growth of other narratives in crypto internet capital markets on SOL feed NEAR intents Zcash in concern for privacy feed NEAR Intents agentic commerce in the growth of x402 grows NEAR once again through NEAR intents.

29. 8:02

    NEAR intents is the universal liquidity layer and the NEAR token runs crypto commerce between chains. If you're interested in the deeper dive of this video, there's a longer video that expands on each of these 28 points. We highly recommend you take a look at it. Otherwise, that's all for today. We'll do this all again real soon.