NEAR Adds Staking-Based Payments For AI Compute Credits

NEAR has launched a staking-based payment model for NEAR AI, giving users a way to lock NEAR tokens and receive monthly compute credits instead of paying through traditional cloud billing or credit-card rails.
According to the validated notes, the system gives users access to 43 hosted AI models, including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The key detail is that tokens are not consumed. Users lock NEAR and receive compute credits proportional to their stake size.
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