TL;DR:
- Illia Polosukhin declared at the Digital Asset Summit 2026 in Singapore that users no longer require centralized platforms for much of their operational activity.
- The near.com infrastructure integrated tokenized stocks in September via Ondo Finance and euro banking connections through Monerium.
- The NEAR Intents protocol recovered the entire $3.8 million stolen in a technical exploit resolved in early October.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, stated this Wednesday that decentralized tools could reduce the everyday use of centralized exchanges. The statement took place during an interview at the Digital Asset Summit 2026 event held in Singapore.
The executive explained that the development of unified interfaces like near.com makes it possible to execute complex transactions directly on the blockchain. According to the market report, the executive argued that the need for traditional intermediaries declines as onchain services integrate comprehensive financial features.
During his remarks, Polosukhin recounted having personally experienced the arbitrary closure of an account on a centralized platform, despite maintaining direct contact with its CEO. According to his testimony cited by the source, these operational vulnerabilities are driving the migration toward systems where users retain full custody and control of their assets.
Fiat Expansion and Traditional Assets on NEAR
The near.com platform combines multi-chain spot trading, perpetual futures contracts, passive yield products, and tokenized stocks into a single interface. According to NEAR’s technical documentation, most of the NEAR Intents infrastructure currently runs on a confidential shard, allowing order privacy to be preserved while users maintain the ability to disclose individual transactions for regulatory or tax purposes.
In September 2026, the portal integrated tokenized equities through a collaboration with Ondo Finance. This functionality enables routing fiat balances directly into traditional equities, such as Nvidia shares, in digital token format.
Polosukhin confirmed that the team is working on enabling direct bank withdrawals and generating transaction histories designed for tax compliance. According to the executive’s statements, the project’s technical roadmap aims to process direct swaps across any asset pair, including US dollars, euros, Singapore dollars, and Hong Kong dollars. Currently, the system already operates on/off-ramps between bank accounts in the European Union and the EURe token via IBAN links provided by Monerium.
The executive’s stance comes in the wake of a technical incident recorded during the first week of October within the NEAR Intents infrastructure. The protocol suffered an exploit stemming from the interaction between its Omni mechanism and the platform’s smart contracts, compromising $3.8 million. The funds were fully returned following an ultimatum issued by the project’s leadership, allowing normal operations to resume after deploying a security patch.
NEAR’s near-term roadmap includes the onboarding of artificial intelligence agents through the Agent Market. Based on the technical design presented by Polosukhin, this system will rely on escrow contracts that release funds exclusively when agents verify the completion of tasks prompted in natural language, expanding the protocol’s scope toward direct onchain commerce before the end of the current quarter.
