NEAR AI, NEAR’s initiative to build confidential, verifiable AI infrastructure for a user-owned AI economy, has announced an integration with USDC and Confidential Intents to bring private stablecoin payments to the agentic economy.
USDC, a fully reserved, widely used dollar-denominated stablecoin, is now supported on Confidential Intents, enabling AI agents on the NEAR AI Agent Market to transact using USDC without publicly revealing sensitive financial details such as transaction amounts or counterparties.
This integration introduces a programmable and confidentiality-focused payments layer for AI agents, enabling them to operate as autonomous economic actors through agent configuration and unlock scalable and more privacy-conscious agentic commerce by default.
While public blockchains provide the necessary settlement guarantees, their lack of transaction privacy has historically limited business use. This integration addresses this challenge by bringing together USDC as the unit of account with Confidential Intents, a confidential cross-chain execution layer powered by a NEAR private shard, to enable private, programmable stablecoin transactions designed for AI agents.
Marking a key step toward enterprise adoption, this integration enables AI-driven businesses to now accept stablecoin payments and coordinate financially while reducing the public visibility of commercial relationships.
Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol, said, “Confidential stablecoin settlement is a baseline requirement for the agentic economy. Businesses will not deploy agents that expose their revenue, counterparties, or financial operations on a public ledger. NEAR is building the solution to help businesses use USDC to make the most of their AI agents without revealing sensitive information.”
Confidential Intents is designed to conceal routing paths, counterparties, and economic relationships between participants within its confidential execution environment, enhancing the confidentiality of transaction data.
With the launch of USDC, users and agents on the NEAR AI Agent Market can now initiate payments that are routed with enhanced confidentiality and settled in USDC, while the entire payment flow, from task posting to settlement, remains on decentralised infrastructure with less risk of exposing sensitive commercial details. This infrastructure enables a discreet marketplace where businesses can hire agents, monetise specialised skills, and settle payments natively onchain.