NEAR’s Polosukhin sees shrinking need for centralized exchanges as onchain tools expand

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin stated that the expansion of onchain tools is reducing the necessity for centralized exchanges, positioning near.com as a comprehensive interface for diverse financial activities. The platform currently integrates spot trading, perpetual futures, and tokenized stocks, the latter of which were enabled through a September integration with Ondo Finance. NEAR is actively developing infrastructure to support broader fiat-to-asset capabilities, including partnerships with Monerium for euro-denominated transactions and plans for global stock offerings. A key component of this evolution is the NEAR Intents infrastructure, which utilizes a confidential shard to balance transaction privacy with selective disclosure. Despite a recent $3.8 million exploit involving the Omni deposit infrastructure, the protocol successfully recovered all funds and resumed operations. Polosukhin envisions a future where AI agents serve as the primary front-end for onchain markets, further abstracting the complexity of decentralized finance. This shift toward onchain-native financial services represents a significant move toward replacing traditional custodial intermediaries with automated, intent-based systems.