Bankless · Tuesday, August 11, 2026
NEAR is developing a market for AI compute using its Intents infrastructure, aiming to bring transparency and liquidity to what is currently an opaque market. This aims to address the complexities of different GPU qualities and delivery, allowing for verifiable and confidential compute transactions.
“The compute market underneath right now is a complete disaster, right? It's a very opaque, every cloud is like, you know, deal making left and right. It's kind of, you know, This is exactly what blockchain is made for, right? Because really creating transparency, liquidity, reducing, like allowing people to reduce risk, right?”
“And so I think, again, blockchain here is in a unique position to do this, but it needs to be done in a very intelligent way. And, you know, maybe we'll do another episode on how we're approaching this. But I think, yeah, we have an opportunity to actually offer something where, you know, you can have kind of an abstraction to you can easily trade. And at the same time, you can have all the details and you can actually get the delivery, right?”
“So the TLDR is like we're using Intense, right? Intense is a great abstraction for those general markets where you don't actually know, like you as a buyer or seller, as a buyer, let's just say, you have the kind of rough boundaries of what you want, right?”