NEAR Executive Says Network Is Better Prepared Than Bitcoin For Crypto’s ‘Black Swan’
NEAR Protocol’s (NEAR) price edged lower on Sunday, extending its slide from October highs, as Near One chief technology officer (CTO) Anton Astafiev said the network was better prepared than Bitcoin (BTC) for a “Black Swan” event in cryptography.On The Rollup podcast published Saturday, Astafiev said NEAR was "better positioned than many earlier blockchains, especially Bitcoin." He credited the network's original account design, which allowed it to "add more signing schemes any time."Astafiev said most blockchains must pick one signing scheme, and in case they needed to switch later, that would be “a massive, massive transition and maybe years of work.”"For us, it's like we just roll it out,” he said.Planning For The WorstAstafiev said the team was "already thinking about Black Swan kind of events in cryptography, like cryptographic disaster or cryptography becomes broken today."Responding to Ethereum (ETH) researcher Justin Drake's recent warnings about quantum computing, he said that he wasn’t opposed to the message, but that he was “arguing with the way it was delivered." Astafiev said preparing for such an event would not be simple.“It's not going to be easy. It's going to be quite a significant amount of work,” he said.The User-Owned AI PushAlex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs and Defuse Labs, the team behind NEAR Intents, said that user-owned AI “should be free.” He said NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain trading service, was “exactly the money-making machine” needed to fund it.Additionally, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said NEAR AI aims to offer “private, verifiable, and secure AI” for people and companies. He tied that goal to NEAR’s focus on privacy. “Blockchain was supposed to be private,” he said. “Satoshi just didn’t have technology to do it.”NEAR Slides As Retail Sentiment Turns Extremely BearishHis comments came as NEAR slipped more than 11% in a month. was down over 2% during the past 24 hours, amid broader market weakness. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around NEAR was in the ‘extremely bearish’ territory, while chatter around it stayed at ‘low’ levels over the past day.Meanwhile, was down 0.5% over 24 hours. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around BTC remained in the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it shifted to ‘normal’ from ‘low’ over the past day.NEAR has gained over 194% so far this year, while Bitcoin is down over 8% during the same period.