NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has outlined 13 application ideas spanning AI pets, private trading, and cross-chain payments, alongside five suggestions for helping developers reach users. According to his Oct. 3 X post, new and returning developers had been building on NEAR over the preceding couple of weeks, while development itself had become easier. Polosukhin framed product selection and distribution as the questions developers now need to address, stating that "building itself got easier too, so it's really about what to build and how stand out to get distribution."
For merchants and application developers, Polosukhin proposed a universal checkout widget that would let customers pay through NEAR Intents using the wallet and blockchain they already hold assets on. Under his suggested approach, developers would offer the button directly to merchants and seek to bring it into Shopify. For event organizers, he suggested a registration system that would hold attendees' deposits in escrow until the host checks them in, with participants who attend then dividing the contributed funds. Drawing on an earlier project called Kickback, he proposed extending the model across different blockchains and assets to make crypto event registrations more reliable.
For consumer-facing applications, Polosukhin proposed an "AI Tamagochi" built around digital characters represented by non-fungible tokens, where each character would carry a NEAR balance to fund AI inference. His proposed payment mechanism has related infrastructure already in place, as NEAR introduced staking-based AI payments that convert locked tokens into monthly computing credits covering 43 AI models at launch. For information products, he suggested an AI encyclopedia whose facts would become ongoing prediction markets, borrowing from the Augur model. Rather than relying on community editing, his proposal would have AI generate pages from the markets' current assessment of each fact.
For over-the-counter trading, Polosukhin identified finding a counterparty as an obstacle in NEAR Intents' existing "private deals" feature, proposing a marketplace where participants could communicate available deals and let others fill them through NEAR Intents. For social trading, he suggested selling viewing keys that would give selected customers access to otherwise private transactions. Under the label "Never get liquidated," he proposed using NEAR Intents to manage lending and perpetual futures positions, seeking interest income while managing liquidation exposure. In healthcare, he suggested a frontend that would encrypt medical data end-to-end before sending it to NEAR AI for a second opinion.
On distribution, Polosukhin advised developers to engage NEARLegion, reach other communities through cross-promotion, and promote their products through Product Hunt, similar discovery platforms, and X. According to his post, wallet compatibility also featured in his distribution advice, with Aurora's Intent Connect recommended to allow people to use applications from other chains without arranging a bridge or learning how to operate on NEAR. On Sep. 29, Bitwise announced its U.S. NEAR ETF launch on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR, with a 0.75% management fee and plans to stake its holdings, providing U.S. investors with a listed route to the network's token.
