Open Agents Alliance: A New Era of Open Source AI and Cryptocurrency Integration
The blockchain network NEAR.AI and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase are leading the way in a groundbreaking project known as the Open Agents Alliance (OAA). Presented at ETHDenver 2025, one of the premier crypto conferences in the United States, the initiative aims to revolutionize the field of artificial intelligence by promoting open, scalable, and accessible AI.
Illia Polosukhin, CTO and co-founder of NEAR.AI, is at the forefront of driving innovation in decentralized technology and a beneficial Web3, regardless of individual resources. The key tool to achieve this goal is the OAA: a collaborative organization to facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge on the hot topic of user-owned AI that respects rights, transparency, and data privacy.
The Vision of Open Agents Alliance
The OAA is an alliance for the introduction of open-source AI agents, with the goal of expanding cryptographic power to build a globally distributed network that provides secure and accessible AI services at no cost to end users. The alliance views artificial intelligence as a public good, with applications that must ensure fair rewards for developers and ensure that users own their data.
The alliance aims to foster an open community where AI agents become integrated economic actors in people’s daily lives, empowering users while protecting their rights and privacy. To achieve this goal, the OAA offers various features such as front-end applications with integrated user bases capable of leveraging AI assistants.
End-to-End Payment and Fiat-to-Crypto Transition
To reach the majority of the over 5.5 billion internet users, the Open Agents Alliance seeks to develop payment systems that reward all contributors and engage non-crypto users. In this case, the chosen path is a system with fiat on-ramps and off-ramps that facilitate currency exchange with cryptocurrencies, bridging traditional finance with the digital asset market.
NEAR.AI enables seamless conversion to USDC on Base and then USDC on NEAR at minimal or no cost. Additionally, the OAA method offers a secure cloud-based hosting infrastructure and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that minimizes the costs of creating and distributing agents, a set of hardware providers that can be utilized by any hosting platform with assurance against attacks, and an open-source developer kit to rapidly develop features and learn from each other.
Alliance Partners
The flagship of the Open Agents Alliance is NEAR.AI, a decentralized platform designed by founders Illia Polosukhin and Alex Skidanov for building web-usable applications. In the AI sector, NEAR has already announced plans to build the largest open-source model with 1.4T parameters. Leading the charge among its supporters is the exchange Coinbase with its Onramp (fiat support ramp) and AgentKit spin-offs, a framework bridging AI and blockchain technology.
The entities that have already joined the OAA are leaders in the blockchain world and dApps, privacy and infrastructure security, hosting, hardware supply, and digital payments. The list of allies is long and ranges from decentralized cloud computing marketplace Akash to the move-to-earn platform SWEAT Economy, through the decentralized finance protocol Frax Fin (home to Harmony, also known as ONE, one of the world’s largest stablecoins) and the democratic governance lab MotherDAO. Here is the complete, continuously updated list:
- NEAR.AI;
- Coinbase Onramp & AgentKit;
- Eliza Labs;
- Aethir;
- Bitte Protocol;
- Akash;
- Phala Network;
- Hyperbolic;
- Exabits;
- SWEAT Economy;
- HOT;
- Frax Fin;
- Arc;
- MotherDAO.
