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NEAR's conference on AI agents, privacy and open infrastructure.
NEARCON 2026 was the NEAR ecosystem's two-day conference at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Its focus was on AI agents, privacy and the infrastructure behind them.
NEARCON is the yearly conference of the NEAR Protocol community, organised by the NEAR Foundation. The 2026 edition took place on 23 and 24 February at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco under the theme "Private. Intelligent. Yours."
The programme concentrated on where AI and blockchains meet: autonomous agents that handle payments, private AI, and formal verification of AI systems. Speakers included NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Brave chief executive Brendan Eich and AI researcher Lukasz Kaiser, and finalists from a virtual builder competition presented their projects on site.
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Most sessions dealt with AI agents, private AI and how agents can pay and trade on chain.
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NEAR's Bowen Wang presented Nightshade 3.0, described as the next evolution of NEAR Protocol.
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Finalists from the virtual Innovation Sandbox competition demonstrated their projects live.
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The organisers published recordings of the sessions on the conference site.
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