At Binance Blockchain Week 2025, in Dubai, AltCoin Desk got the opportunity to speak with NEAR Foundation CFO and CSO, David Norris. The NEAR Foundation was launched in April 2020 to support the NEAR protocol during its mainnet launch, which occurred around the same time.
In this candid conversation, Norris shared his thoughts on the parameters used to measure economic value generated in the NEAR ecosystem, Nightshade Sharding, AI, and more.
Evolving beyond traditional metrics of success
Speaking at the event, Norris said that the old parameters for measuring success in the blockchain industry might no longer necessarily be applicable to projects.
Historically, most Layer-1s have looked at the revenue of a chain, the number of transactions going through, the number of users, and developers. They’ve been key metrics. But the industry is growing now.
Source: David Norris
Norris remarked that the digital assets industry has now reached a point where the NEAR Foundation is witnessing the development of companies that are generating real USD-based revenues. These revenues are being used to send value through to the NEAR token.
Norris remarked that the revenues being generated through the AI products, such as Near Intense – the ecosystem’s cross-chain swap mechanism – are being utilized to strategically boost the NEAR token. He teased that there’s going to be some “exciting news” that will come up that’s going to drive value through to the NEAR token over time.
Integrating AI into NEAR ecosystem
It is worth highlighting that NEAR actually started as an AI company, called NEAR.ai back in 2017. When asked about NEAR’s long-term strategy to integrate AI into the digital assets industry, Norris said the Foundation had a serious talk on the matter about 18 months back.
We saw the rise of ChatGPT and the threat of some of the largest players that are coming through, where your data is being used to fuel all of the models that are coming through. That can actually be really dangerous over time.
Source: David Norris
Norris stated that the NEAR ecosystem has been busy building several AI-focused products, such as decentralized confidential machine learning (DCML), private chat, and agentic frameworks, among others.
He gave the example of a travel agent, that allows AI agents to be able to find your travel, book it, and pay for it on the blockchain. He added that there are a lot more such AI-based use cases coming through.
Evaluating success potential of emerging verticals
Norris shared the NEAR Foundation’s evaluation framework when deciding which emerging sector to invest in, such as AI, DePIN, or SocialFi. He recalled how in the past, all the Layer-1 blockchains used to just throw money at everything and see what sticks. However, now there’s an easy way to evaluate sectors with potential.
If it’s not AI, if it’s not reinforcing our products on AI, if it’s not cross-chain swaps and not reinforcing our products there, then we’re probably not going to be putting our funding that way. We need pure focus to be successful in what we are doing.
Source: David Norris
He concluded by saying that the days of chasing meta-trends are over at NEAR. The ecosystem is now purely focusing on AI and cross-chain swap mechanisms.
Sharing the ‘alpha’ on NEAR’s Nightshade Sharding
Continuing the conversation, Norris noted that the NEAR ecosystem has been blessed when it comes to having gifted engineers – referring to Bowen Wang, the current CTO of NEAR Protocol.
Nightshade 2.0 effectively moves away from the traditional approach of people standing in the queue, waiting for that transaction to be validated. In most Layer-1s, you see that whenever there’s congestion, the whole chain comes to a halt.
Source: David Norris
However, such a mishap has never occurred on the NEAR blockchain because of sharding. Instead of all validators trying to validate one transaction, that transaction splits up “among lots of bits across lots of little shards.”
He added that such a mechanism allows greater security because no single person has the view of the entire transaction. It also allows greater speed, because you can have unlimited shards. Currently, the NEAR project is working toward scaling up to a million transactions in a second.
This is actually by design because we do see a future where AI agents will be working on behalf of everyone. That means you need to have a chain that is super-scalable.
Source: David Norris
Envisioning the future of NEAR and Web3
Towards the end of the interview, Norris emphasized that NEAR is probably the only crypto company that is comfortably positioned to win against three major challenges facing the digital assets industry for a long time.
One, fast, scalable blockchain; two, unified liquidity to be able to exchange assets across any chains, and number three, bringing AI journeys together with crypto. Probably the most bullish I’ve ever been on NEAR right now.
Source: David Norris
