The NEAR Foundation has made a significant move to advance the integration of artificial intelligence with blockchain technology by providing substantial support to the NEAT Protocol, a specialized rollup solution for AI applications on the NEAR platform.
In a groundbreaking initiative, the foundation has allocated 1 million $NEAR tokens to NEAT, with the goal of redistributing all token rewards from this delegation to $NEAT stakers, offering an attractive annual percentage yield (APY) of 120-200%. This strategic move forms part of the NEAR Foundation’s broader efforts to foster collaborations between AI and blockchain within its ecosystem, setting a precedent for future projects.
NEAT Protocol, the first rollup scaling protocol officially endorsed by the NEAR Foundation, is set to receive funding to enhance its infrastructure and attract a wider user base to its platform. Built on the NEAR inscription standard, NEAT is designed to streamline AI and machine-learning applications on blockchain by efficiently handling data and reducing transaction costs to meet the high computational demands of these technologies.
With a unique approach that utilizes off-chain indexer nodes for execution and NEAR’s Layer 1 (L1) for data availability, NEAT revolutionizes the traditional rollup process. By eliminating the need to deploy smart contracts or run verification logic on L1, NEAT significantly reduces transaction costs and enhances overall system efficiency, making it an ideal platform for computationally intensive applications like AI and interactive gaming environments.
Further enriching the ecosystem is the NEAR Catalog, empowered by NEAT, which is developing an advanced indexer to offer flexible and cost-effective indexing and querying capabilities for seamless interactions and data retrieval across the NEAR platform. This development is essential for projects seeking to integrate complex data sets and requiring scalable solutions to manage their operations effectively.
$NEAT tokens, available in NRC-20 and NEP-141 forms with a total circulation of 42 million tokens, play a central role in the NEAT ecosystem. These tokens provide various benefits to holders, including rewards from staking $NEAR tokens and a share of fees generated from ecosystem operations like wrap/unwrap activities and marketplace transactions. Additionally, once NEAT’s decentralized indexer network is operational, a portion of indexing fees will be distributed among $NEAT-NEP141 stakers, enhancing the security and reliability of data processing through verifiable execution using zero-knowledge proofs.
NEAT’s technology holds great promise in the field of artificial intelligence, enabling innovative AI-driven projects with robust indexing capabilities and off-chain execution integration through zero-knowledge proofs. This breakthrough opens up possibilities for fully open-source AI-powered games where community engagement influences the game’s narrative, securely recorded on the blockchain. As NEAT evolves and expands its offerings, the impact on AI and blockchain development is poised to be significant, driving the realization of decentralized and scalable AI applications.