NEAR Protocol Launches Staking-Based AI Fee Payment Feature, Unlocking Access to All 43 NEAR AI Models

Odaily News: NEAR Protocol announced that users can now pay for confidential inference and continuously running agent fees by staking NEAR tokens, eliminating the need to bind a credit card. Staked NEAR will be converted into monthly compute credits, with the credit amount scaling according to the staked volume. The funds themselves are not consumed and can be retrieved upon unstaking. All 43 models on NEAR AI, including those from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others, are accessible through this staking mechanism.