NEAR’s Polosukhin sees shrinking need for centralized exchanges as onchain tools expand
NEAR Protocol (NEAR) co-founder Illia Polosukhin said users no longer need centralized exchanges for "a lot" of crypto activity as near.com expands its onchain offerings."I think for a lot of things now, you don't need it," Polosukhin told The Block's Gareth Jenkinson during a live interview at Digital Asset Summit 2026 in Singapore on Wednesday. He described near.com as "almost there" and said it has a "big roadmap of things to keep adding," pointing to bank withdrawals, transaction records for tax purposes, and selective disclosure of confidential transactions among the areas it has been working on.Polosukhin also pointed to his own experience with a centralized exchange, saying one of his accounts was deleted despite knowing the company's CEO. "You log in, and it says this account doesn't exist," he said.Near.com brings spot trading across different chains, tokenized stocks, earn products, and perpetual futures into one interface. Polosukhin said most of the NEAR Intents infrastructure has moved to a confidential shard, allowing trading activity to remain private while users can reveal individual transactions when needed. Polosukhin previously discussed Confidential Intents and privacy on The Block's The Starting Block in July.More fiat and stocks planned"We have a lot of fiat-related stuff coming as well," Polosukhin said. He highlighted NEAR's existing work with Monerium, which allows users to move between euros in a bank account and EURe through an IBAN. Ultimately, the plan is for NEAR Intents to handle "any asset to any asset," he said, giving examples including U.S. dollars to euros and Singapore dollars to Hong Kong dollars.Tokenized stocks are already available through near.com following a September integration with Ondo Finance. Polosukhin said users can, for example, move from euros into tokenized Nvidia stock, adding that NEAR is "planning to add more stocks kind of around the world."The comments come less than a week after NEAR Intents suffered a roughly $3.8 million exploit that temporarily halted services. The Block reported at the time that a bug affected the interaction between its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and the NEAR Intents smart contract. The vulnerability was patched, with NEAR Intents pledging to compensate affected users, and near.com and NEAR Intents subsequently came back online. The funds were eventually returned in full following an ultimatum from NEAR Intents General Manager Alex Shevchenko.Polosukhin said Wednesday that NEAR's roadmap extends further beyond crypto-to-crypto transactions, with the project looking to add more fiat routes and eventually enable commerce directly onchain.AI agentsPolosukhin also sees AI agents as another interface for onchain markets. "AI is a front-end, blockchain is a back-end," he said, adding that, more specifically now, "agent is a front-end and markets is a back-end."He pointed to NEAR's Agent Market, which extends the intents model to tasks requested in natural language. Users can describe what they want done, Polosukhin said, with Agent Market finding agents that can carry it out. The money is held in escrow and released once the work is verified.