NEAR Protocol closed July with several infrastructure releases spanning artificial intelligence, core network scaling and cross-chain settlement. The month’s updates included staking-based payments for NEAR AI, the launch of IronClaw 1.0 and the activation of nearcore 2.13 on mainnet, giving the ecosystem new tools at both the application and protocol layers.
The releases are related through NEAR’s broader effort to support software agents that can run continuously, access private computation and move assets across blockchains. They should not be treated as one unified product launch: NEAR AI services, the IronClaw runtime, the Layer 1 upgrade and NEAR Intents each have separate mechanics, adoption indicators and operational risks.
What NEAR shipped last month:
✦ NEAR Intents crossed $24B+ in all-time volume.
✦ NEAR Protocol 2.13 upgrade brought quantum-safe signing, dynamic resharding, and more live to mainnet.
✦ NEAR staking for NEAR AI compute went live.
✦ IronClaw 1.0 went live.
✦ Confidential…— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) August 2, 2026
Staking Becomes a Payment Rail for NEAR AI
NEAR AI now lets users stake NEAR to obtain credits for confidential inference and agent hosting. Agent-hosting credits are allocated through a stake-based monthly ratio, while private-inference credits accrue from the yield generated by the stake. The principal remains withdrawable, but staking rewards are redirected toward service usage, and credit allocations stop or change when users unstake or alter their subscription.
IronClaw 1.0 launched on July 27 as a rebuilt, open-source agent runtime with persistent state and a centralized guard layer that reviews actions. The release is designed to keep long-running agents operational across command-line, web, Slack and Telegram interfaces, while allowing scheduled routines and recovery after interruptions. NEAR AI said direct upgrades for existing deployments were not yet available at launch.
Security controls sit beneath that agent experience. IronClaw’s public repository describes WebAssembly sandboxes, endpoint allowlists and host-boundary credential injection, while NEAR AI offers hosted deployments inside trusted execution environments. These controls are intended to keep secrets away from the model and restrict outbound activity, but they do not eliminate software bugs, configuration errors or dependence on NEAR AI’s hosted infrastructure.
Mainnet Upgrade Adds Automatic Sharding and Quantum-Safe Keys
Nearcore 2.13 introduced dynamic resharding, allowing shards to split at epoch boundaries when runtime state reaches configured thresholds. The mechanism reduces the need for developers and validators to coordinate a separate protocol upgrade whenever the network requires a new shard layout, although it does not guarantee that capacity will expand instantly in response to every traffic spike.
The same upgrade stabilized ML-DSA-65 as an additional transaction-signature and access-key scheme. NIST standardized the underlying algorithm through FIPS 204 as a post-quantum digital-signature standard. Existing NEAR accounts do not become quantum-resistant automatically; users and applications must create and use ML-DSA-65 keys to receive that protection.
NEAR also reported that Intents surpassed $24 billion in cumulative cross-chain volume during July. DefiLlama now tracks approximately $24.35 billion in lifetime spot-swap volume for the system. That milestone shows substantial settlement activity, but it does not measure adoption of confidential execution or AI-agent payments separately, and cumulative volume cannot establish whether current growth will persist.
Taken together, the July releases expand NEAR’s technical stack from Layer 1 scaling to private AI services and cross-chain execution. The next performance indicators will be active AI stakes, deployed IronClaw agents, post-quantum key adoption and sustained Intents volume, rather than the availability of the infrastructure alone.