Sal Ternullo

Yeah, I think this is the result of five years of really top-notch engineering and delivery now on the product side as well with Near Intense proving product market fit over the last year, rapidly scaling.

And Near AI and Ironclaw now coming to the fore to really show the thinking that's been part of the ecosystem and design of the system over the past five years and really coming to light now with the focus of the crypto AI narrative, but more importantly, how Near shines in the context of agenda commerce.

We could talk about these specific kind of verticals in their own regards, but I think it's the result really of the technology now reaching product market fit with Intense and Ironclaw quickly following on a similar trajectory to what we saw with Intense over the past 12 months.

Yeah, I mean, I don't contest the point in terms of narrative changes in the ecosystem.

I've been on the ground floor since pre-mainnet launch where investors out of two venture funds, A100X being the most recent in the native token, but also in products in the ecosystem.

I would describe this not as a pivot, but as a returning to roots in the context of, you know, why NEAR was actually built with Ilya leaving Google Research, looking at how to build distributed training systems and distributed compute systems, and ultimately realizing that there was a missing backend infrastructure layer, which became their protocol.

I think now they've landed on kind of what you'll describe as the final pivot with real product market fit behind these verticals.

And you'll see that continue to take up throughout the 26th year.

But I kind of describe it of coming back to the roots and realizing the vision that Ilya and Alex and team have always painted around the protocol.

Yeah, near the token is really like AI money.

It's like, how do agents in a self-sovereign, user-controlled fashion actually transact on our behalf in the real economy?

And so in this broader frame that crosses Web 2, Web 3 of agenda commerce, I look at near as a token as AI money.

And these components and verticals that we're talking about around near intense, near AI, private cloud, and iron claw are really the embodiment of

How do you build private user-owned AI and have a native asset in Near Token that is the mechanism of settlement and value exchange in an abstracted way?

You don't need to know how you're interacting across chain using intents.

It's just a seamless user experience, unified liquidity.

And so that's how I would describe Near in kind of a simple, simple form.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the common narrative and chalk track in the market is we're going to have billions of agents that will do transactions at a frequency and velocity that is inconsistent with how humans interact with software and financial systems today.

I think that's absolutely true.