NEAR AI announced on May 14, 2026, that USDC had been integrated with Confidential Intents to enable private payments in the NEAR AI Agent Market. In its official announcement, NEAR said the integration allows AI agents to settle payments in USDC without publicly exposing sensitive financial information, including transaction amounts or counterparties. The main visible references are NEAR’s official announcement, the NEAR AI Agent Market and the NEAR Intents documentation.
USDC goes live for private agent payments
The product lets users or businesses post tasks in the NEAR AI Agent Market, have agents complete the work and settle payment in USDC through NEAR Intents. The public market page shows open jobs, in-progress jobs and completed jobs, and presents the environment as an ALPHA marketplace for agentic collaboration with escrow-backed payments.
Confidential Intents operates as a confidential execution layer for payments and cross-chain transactions. NEAR says the system hides routes, counterparties and economic relationships inside a confidential execution environment supported by a NEAR private shard, with final settlement handled through decentralized infrastructure. This remains NEAR’s technical description from the announcement and public documentation, not an independent external verification.
Multichain scope and adoption claims
The 34+ networks figure comes from promotional social posts by NEAR AI, NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin and related accounts around the launch. Public materials use non-uniform multichain counts: the NEAR Intents documentation refers to 32 chains, while near.com uses a broader 35+ networks commercial claim. The accurate framing is that NEAR promoted the integration as multichain, but the visible sources do not establish one closed, consistent number.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, was quoted in NEAR’s official announcement saying that confidential stablecoin settlement is a baseline requirement for the agentic economy because companies will not deploy agents that expose revenue, counterparties or financial operations on a public blockchain. That statement reflects Polosukhin’s and NEAR’s market thesis, not evidence of large-scale enterprise adoption.
Based on the available material, the confirmed status is narrower: USDC is supported in Confidential Intents for the NEAR AI Agent Market; the marketplace lets users post jobs and pay agents; NEAR positions the integration as private payment infrastructure for agentic commerce; and the multichain scope remains a promotional claim with non-uniform public counts.