Bankless · Tuesday, August 11, 2026
NEAR has launched a new integration allowing users to pay for AI inference services on the NEAR AI Cloud by staking the NEAR token. This move aims to provide a 'universal basic AI' for NEAR holders, offering access to AI inference capabilities.
“So you can now pay for inference on the NIR AI cloud by staking NIR. So stake NIR, receive free inference for yourself or your agent.”
“But traditionally, you would need to pay with fiat, right? You know, credit card, you can pay with that, obviously, or you could have paid with crypto. Now, you still need to pay, right? And it's like a subscription fee or you need to pay per million tokens. And so it kind of limits, at least from my perspective, you kind of have this as your recurring bill now. And so what we effectively launched is this idea that if you're holding near, you should have, it's a universal basic AI.”
“Right, effectively. If you hold Near, you have access to, you know, some amount of AI inference that is available to you and you can use it in your agent or in other applications and you can effectively access this through that.”