NEAR Unveils Super App to Centralize Crypto Activities

Blockchain infrastructure company NEAR has introduced a super app designed to help users operate their financial life on blockchains.

“NEAR Protocol Co-founder [Illia Polosukhin] just unveiled near.com on stage: a super-app on crypto rails, powered by NEAR Intents. Now live,” the company said in a Monday (Feb. 23) post on X. “Swap across 35+ chains. Go confidential. Trade P2P. All from a single account. Your onchain world, unified.”

NEAR Intents is the company’s multichain protocol, per the company’s website.

According to the near.com website, with the capabilities provided by the super app, users can swap as quickly as they could on any centralized exchange; use their idle assets to access onchain yield with no lockups or commitments; make deposits, transfers and swaps while staying confidential by default and choosing to whom these transactions will be visible; and trade peer to peer with the help of smart contracts, and no middlemen.

NEAR’s roadmap for the new super app includes artificial intelligence-assisted financial management featuring smart agents that surface information; tradeable real-world assets such as tokenized equities and bonds; virtual bank accounts that enable users to move between traditional currencies and digital assets; and debit cards, per the page.

“New capabilities are shipping fast,” the company said on the page. “Your account is ready for all of them.”

In another development in this space, Coinbase said Feb. 11 that it developed a crypto wallet infrastructure designed for AI agents. The cryptocurrency exchange said its Agentic Wallets let users quickly equip agents with autonomous spending, earning and trading capabilities.

In December, crypto wallet Trust Wallet integrated Revolut as a payment provider so that users could fund their wallets instantly and buy crypto across Europe. Trust Wallet said that its self-custody wallet has more than 200 million users, and that Revolut’s financial app has 65 million users.

In June, Stripe acquired Privy, a crypto firm that helps companies build crypto wallets. Privy CEO Henri Stern wrote at the time in a blog post: “Like us, Stripe believes in the power of bringing crypto and fiat closer together, marrying these systems so deeply that the distinction becomes almost meaningless.”