NEAR Infrastructure Committee
Now that 2025 has come to a close, it is time to reflect on the main accomplishments and improvements enabled by the NEAR Infrastructure Committee (IC), a group focused on strengthening the network’s foundational infrastructure. We’ll also dive into how the IC will support what is coming in 2026 for the NEAR ecosystem.
By leveraging the new proposal and funding workflow at nearn.io/infra-committee, the IC supported and fostered the critical foundations that keep the network running (RPC providers, indexers, wallets, oracles, explorers) through concrete RFPs and open general proposal submissions. The same core principle will apply for 2026, ensuring that NEAR’s infrastructure is ready to power agentic commerce where users operate with intent.
2025 Recap: Chain abstraction and Ecosystem Growth
If 2024 was about “fixing the plumbing” for the infrastructure in NEAR, 2025 was the year we built the rest of the house. The IC supported foundational initiatives both to make the network accessible for millions of users, and also to unlock new use cases (chain abstraction) and products (NEAR Intents). Let’s delve into the most important ones.
- The Chain Abstraction Vision
The vision of chain abstraction became a reality this year. The generalization of chain signatures together with the NEAR Intents’ rapid adoption are proof of it. But this could not have happened without the adoption and adaptation of key infra components. From chain abstracted relayers to “Intents-native” integrations on wallets, the IC has focused on supporting the chain abstraction vision inherent to the NEAR Ecosystem.
Wallets + Intents: All the native wallets in the NEAR ecosystem, Meteor, HOT, Intear, Near Mobile and Nightly, have integrated with NEAR Intents to offer market-leading cross-chain swaps. And this is only one of the several initiatives and improvements the teams behind these wallets have accomplished with the support from the IC.
Wallet infra and universal auth: The proposals to revamp Fast Auth and OneClickConnect components, the grant to build a new wallet selector, and the integration with Privy enforce the core idea of users not needing to know which chain they are operating from.
Chain Abstracted Relayer: Tachyon, a multi-chain relayer using NEAR chain signatures under the hood, was the winner of the Chain Abstracted Relayer RFP.
- Strengthening Data Access and Analytics
In order to build on NEAR, developers need to see what is happening in the blockchain. But sub-second block times and multi-sharding architecture make this task a challenge without the right tooling and infrastructure. That is why the IC focused on strengthening the indexer and data lake categories and funded a suite of analytics and explorer tools to ensure data transparency.
Indexers and Data Lakes: Goldsky and The Graph indexers and Allium data lake will facilitate accessing the vast NEAR blockchain data, both at the tip of the chain and historically.
Explorers: The funding for NEARBlocks continued, ensuring the focus on multi-chain indexing to reinforce NEAR Intents visibility.
Analytics Integrations: Proposals to onboard top-tier analytics providers including Token Terminal and Chainspect have been approved. These integrations provide the deep data granularity required by institutional actors and advanced dApp developers.
- Completion of the “Pagoda Wind Down” and Community Ownership
2025 marked the completion of the “Pagoda wind down” initiative. The IC facilitated the transition of main infrastructure services previously managed by Pagoda to sustainable, community-owned alternatives. For example, the Big Query public dataset and the Data Lake framework are seamlessly maintained by Meteor team and Aurora respectively. These both serve as a foundational layer to enable the previous point on data availability and analytics. Also, legacy components like Kit Wallet have been orderly discontinued and their users migrated to more efficient and modern services. All these initiatives pushed to decentralize the operational burden of the network.
- Other notable initiatives and achievements
There was a myriad of other independent or self-contained initiatives within the IC which led to significant improvements for the NEAR ecosystem. Below are some of the major highlights:
- This innovative proposal by Vadym, ecosystem dev, won the TEE-secured Price Oracle RFP.
- Main infra providers like FastNear, LavaNetwork, and Pikespeak participated in the credits program for builders.
- NEAR playground unlocked the IDEs for smart contract development in the NEAR ecosystem.
- Meteor team specified the NEP-621, tokenized vaults, supported by the IC
- PingPay project got funding by the IC to accomplish its multi-currency multi-chain payment layer.
Looking Forward: 2026
In 2026, builders and service providers will still have an open call to propose improvements or novel components in any infra category. Also new RPFs will call for projects to fix specific gaps or build a new infrastructure primitive.
Concretely, some of the topics of focus for 2026 will be (not limited to):
Total chain abstraction: As we enabled chain abstraction in 2025, in 2026 we will focus on scaling it with a larger MPC network, multi-chain verifiable execution via TEEs, etc. Moreover, we will ensure that the foundational infra (bridges, wallets, data sources) is ready for NEAR Intents to become the unified liquidity layer across the whole blockchain industry.
Towards a “sharded” network: In 2026, not only will the NEAR blockchain will be sharded, but the network too. This implies that the ecosystem should be ready to adopt new infra components like sharded RPC nodes or cloud archival nodes.
Privacy focused infra: The IC will ensure that “user-owned AI” remains confidential and private by supporting novel wallet infra and tooling as well as new standards and protocols pushing in this direction.
Continuous improvement: The IC will continue to support infra and ongoing commitments from this year. Some of the projects that started in 2025 will launch during the first half of 2026. NEAR Playground 2.0, the new TEE-secured price oracle, and the new Fast Auth, to name a few, will further strengthen the developer experience, oracles, and wallet infrastructure.
Get Involved
Do you have an idea or see a gap that needs addressing? The IC welcomes participation from the entire NEAR ecosystem through the NEAR Infrastructure Committee Portal at Nearn.io. Ecosystem members are welcome to help create strategic RFPs and vet proposals in the following ways:
Builders: Share your infrastructure needs and pain points
Infrastructure Providers: Submit proposals for innovative solutions
Community Members: Provide feedback on current infrastructure and future needs
Thanks to everyone who contributed to critical NEAR infrastructure in 2025. The IC looks forward to even more great work in 2026.
