SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo returned to Bankless for a conversation with host David Hoffman and Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley on why investors increasingly look at NEAR through the lens of AI.
Sal walked through how value reaches the network. NEAR Intents lets a user state the outcome they want and has a market of solvers deliver it. Behind the human activity on near.com and partner wallets such as Ledger, the system has processed more than $32 billion in volume. Net revenue from those transactions buys back NEAR, which is held by the protocol rather than burned, and SVRN's governance proposal to cut issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% opens a longer research question about whether NEAR could one day move to a fixed supply.
The second half of the conversation turned to AI. Sal described enterprises adopting a tiered approach: frontier models for work that touches no sensitive data, and open models running in confidential computing for the rest. NEAR AI's private inference serves that second tier, and clients can verify for themselves that their prompts and outputs are never exposed.
"The idea that we can build technology to enable users to be sovereign and control their intelligence, control their assets, control their data. We can enable businesses to have sovereignty in the context of their own business environment, and the same on a nation level as well."
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