SVRN has acquired FastNEAR, the company behind the most performant RPC infrastructure powering applications on NEAR. FastNEAR joins SVRN as a wholly owned subsidiary, our first operating business alongside the treasury, and its co-founders, Evgeny (Eugene) Kuzyakov and Mike Purvis, join the team.
We believe conviction in a network should go beyond holding a native asset and extend to investing in the infrastructure developers need to build. Acquiring FastNEAR gives us a direct role in maintaining and expanding infrastructure that applications already use, and a foundation for building additional tools on top.
How RPC works
Most users never think about the systems a wallet queries when it displays a balance. They expect the information to be current, the application to respond, and a submitted transaction to appear when they check its status.
Remote procedure call (RPC) infrastructure makes those interactions possible. On NEAR, it gives software an interface for reading network state, querying accounts and contracts, and submitting transactions. The application presents the experience and the actions. The infrastructure underneath supplies what those actions need, whether that is the current state for a wallet, past activity for a developer, or the underlying data a block explorer queries.
What FastNEAR is
FastNEAR runs the data layer for a large share of NEAR: a fleet of servers that handles reads from and writes to the network, archival infrastructure that stores its complete transaction history, and NEARDATA, a data feed developers use to work with that history. In a typical month that is more than 3.5 billion requests and more than 100 terabytes of data served.
The archival nodes are the expensive, unglamorous half of running a chain. Full history has to be stored, indexed, and served whether or not anyone queries it that day, and the teams that do it well tend to be the ones everyone else depends on without saying so.
When a wallet on NEAR shows a balance, a developer looks up a past transaction, or an application submits a payment, there is a good chance the request lands on a FastNEAR server. That makes it a load-bearing dependency for much of what people actually use on the network.
They kept prices well below what the market would have borne, on the reasoning that expensive data slows a network down. For developers that has meant a dependable service, a simpler integration, and more time spent on the application itself.
From the first conversation that we had together it was clear that there was strong alignment between the vision for SVRN and the products the FastNEAR team has built. We are excited to have Eugene and Mike on the team and advancing their product roadmap and growth agenda.
Every application inherits this layer
No application on NEAR can be faster or more reliable than the layer answering its requests, and every application shares that layer. If a balance loads late the wallet is slow, and if a transaction hangs the application is broken regardless of how good the code above it is. Investment in this layer improves all of them at once.
The economics have never reflected that. Reads and writes are billed like a commodity, the archive costs money whether anyone queries it or not, and reliability goes unnoticed until the day it fails. Venture funding went to the protocol layer first and has since moved on to applications, and the teams carrying the load in between have been left to run on thin margins.
A public company is well placed to fill that gap. We have no fund life and no exit clock, and what we spend on capacity is a line item our shareholders can read. Infrastructure an entire network depends on belongs on a balance sheet built to still be there in ten years, and that is how we think about ours.
What happens next
For FastNEAR's customers, nothing changes. The RPC fleet, the archival infrastructure, and NEARDATA keep running, operated by the team that built them. We will put money into reliability and capacity, because we expect the applications on this infrastructure to be larger next year than they are today.
Owning it also brings SVRN an operating business with paying customers, whose value moves with usage of the network rather than the price of the token.
An operator inside the network
People should stay in control of what they own, what they know, and what their software does on their behalf, and that gets harder as more of daily life is handed to AI agents. NEAR is where I think the open version of that gets built. Holding the asset gives us a stake in that outcome, where running part of the network gives us a hand in it.
Every ecosystem has a foundation and a core team building the protocol. Few have a for-profit operator with permanent capital whose job is to make the network usable in production, and who answers to public shareholders for the result. That is what we are building SVRN into, and it takes people who share the conviction. Eugene and Mike have been running this layer for years, at a scale that would have taken us a long time to reach, and they did it because they believed NEAR was worth building on before most of the market did. Bringing that team into SVRN adds engineering depth we did not have and a view of the network that no amount of capital gets you from the outside.
Running this infrastructure shows us, every day, the distance between what developers ask of the network and what exists. We will close some of those gaps ourselves. Others will be closed by founders closer to the problem than we are, who we now work alongside.
Owning an operating business carries a cost. It consumes management attention and capital before any outcome is known, and if usage of the network does not grow, infrastructure is a cost center rather than a position. That is the risk we are choosing to carry, and it is a fair basis on which to judge the decision.
We take on an operating responsibility to the applications already relying on this infrastructure, and a long-term economic reason to keep investing in what they can build next. The measure of success for FastNEAR is the same as it was before it joined SVRN: billions of requests a month, answered quickly and correctly, and never a reason to wonder how.
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