NEAR Foundation Strengthens Leadership and Enters Next Phase of Growth to Advance AI Innovation.

NEAR Foundation today announced a new phase of growth, marked by the addition of seasoned executives from Bloomberg, Digital Currency Group, Flipside, and dYdX. This strengthened leadership team positions NEAR to accelerate its mission of building a User-Owned AI Future and scaling adoption of privacy-preserving, AI-native products worldwide.

The new appointments include:

• Matt Kummell,  Chief Commercial Officer of NEAR Foundation
• Alycia Tooill,  Head of People of NEAR Foundation
• Chris Briseno,  Chief Marketing Officer of NEAR Foundation
• George Zeng,  Chief Product Officer of NEAR Foundation &
  General Manager of NEAR AI
• Bowen Wang,  Chief Technical Officer of NEAR &
  Founder of NEAR One

Together, these leaders bring decades of combined experience across product, commercialization, marketing, and protocol engineering; driving NEAR’s next phase of decentralized innovation and global adoption.

Over the past five years, NEAR has consistently delivered on its technical roadmap: from pioneering dynamic re-sharding and achieving billions in transaction volume through NEAR Intents, to fulfilling every major milestone outlined in its original white paper. Now, NEAR is entering a new era focused on sustainable growth, value creation, and product expansion in artificial intelligence.

As AI adoption continues to surge, 78% of global businesses integrated AI tools in 2024 according to the Stanford HAI Index, privacy and data ownership have emerged as critical barriers to broader deployment. NEAR is directly addressing these challenges through its forthcoming suite of privacy-preserving AI products, designed to give users full control over their data and decisions in the emerging agentic economy.

“NEAR has focused since the beginning on building great tech. I’m excited to welcome this excellent group of new executives to help us transform tech into products and reach wide adoption beyond the Web3 space,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol and coauthor of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer the foundation for contemporary AI architecture. “NEAR’s vision of open infrastructure powering user-owned and privacy-first AI at global scale is now supercharged with commercial focus.”

This evolution is underpinned by NEAR’s strong onchain traction. NEAR Intents, the Universal Liquidity Layer, recently surpassed $2 billion in transaction volume, with growth expected to double by year-end. Intents forms the core of NEAR’s chain abstraction stack, which enables seamless, goal-driven transactions across 20+ blockchains, 110+ assets, and is now powering the first generation of AI agents capable of autonomous reasoning and execution.

The new executive appointments mark a pivotal step in NEAR’s transition from infrastructure development to product adoption and commercialization. With a leadership team that brings deep experience across fintech, data, and Web3, NEAR is now positioned to compete directly with leading AI firms while maintaining the core principles of decentralization and open innovation.