NEAR Co-Founder Says On-Chain Expansion Will Reduce Centralized Exchanges' Role

NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the expansion of on-chain financial services will reduce the need for centralized exchanges.

In an interview at Singapore's Digital Asset Summit 2026 on Oct. 7, The Block reported, Polosukhin said "many activities no longer require centralized exchanges." He added that NEAR's integrated on-chain platform, near.com, has "almost reached that level" and will continue adding features including bank withdrawals, transaction records for tax filing and selective disclosure for confidential transactions.

near.com offers spot trading across multiple blockchains, tokenized stocks, yield products and perpetual futures on a single screen. Polosukhin said most of NEAR Intents' infrastructure has been moved to confidential shards, allowing users to protect transaction data while selectively disclosing only necessary trades. To illustrate the limitations of centralized exchanges, he cited his own experience. "My account was deleted even though I knew the exchange's CEO," he said.

NEAR also plans to expand links between fiat currencies and on-chain assets. Polosukhin said it will add a broad set of fiat-related features and that a partnership with European payments infrastructure firm Moneyrium will allow users to convert euros held in bank accounts into the euro stablecoin EURe. Over the longer term, the goal is to support exchanges across a wider range of assets, including the US dollar, euro, Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar.

Tokenized stocks were added to near.com in September through an integration with Ondo Finance. Polosukhin said the platform plans to add more globally traded stocks.

The remarks came less than a week after a hack at NEAR Intents resulted in losses of about $3.8 million. The issue stemmed from an interaction error between Omni's deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and NEAR Intents smart contracts. Service resumed after the vulnerability was fixed. NEAR Intents lead Alex Shevchenko later issued an ultimatum demanding the return of the funds, and the full amount was ultimately returned.

Polosukhin also said AI agents will become a new gateway to on-chain services. "If AI is the front end, blockchain is the back end," he said. "It's a structure where agents are the front end and the market is the back end." NEAR's agent market matches users with agents that can carry out natural-language requests, then releases funds held in escrow once completion of the task is verified.