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NEAR Protocol will begin restricting its publicly available RPC endpoints (the connection points that allow applications and developers to read and write data to the blockchain) under both the near.org and pagoda.co domains. The move, approved by NEAR's Infrastructure Committee rather than the NEAR Foundation directly, takes effect June 1, 2025, with rate limits tightening across three monthly phases. Developers who miss the migration window risk having their IP addresses blocked outright.

Notably, the Infrastructure Committee reached this decision without a public comment period, a detail that sits awkwardly alongside NEAR's positioning as a community-governed protocol.

The decision is a direct consequence of the wind-down of Pagoda, NEAR's former developer tooling arm. Pagoda announced in August 2024 that it would cease operations within six months, redistributing its infrastructure services across various ecosystem teams. The free RPC endpoints it maintained were among the most developer-facing of those services and are now being formally retired.

Eric Winer, formerly CTO at Pagoda and now with NEAR AI, explained the committee's reasoning plainly: "The Infrastructure Committee feels that Pagoda's fully-subsidized near.org RPC service was getting in the way of decentralization efforts and is preventing high-quality commercial RPC offerings from gaining traction." The argument is that a permanently free, centrally-managed endpoint distorts the market for the independent node operators NEAR needs to become genuinely decentralized infrastructure. It is a coherent position, but the transition carries real costs that are not shared equally.

What the Rate Cuts Actually Look Like

The deprecation follows a step-down schedule. From June 1, mainnet RPC requests will be capped at 120 per minute. That drops to 60 in July and 30 by August, a 75% reduction over 90 days. Archival RPC access, which allows queries of historical blockchain data, faces an equally steep percentage reduction but from a far lower baseline. The Phase 1 archival rate beginning June 1 is 16 requests per minute, falling to just 4 by August. Because the absolute starting point is so much lower than the mainnet figure, the same percentage cut is operationally far more disruptive. (Developers relying on archival access should confirm their current pre-deprecation rate against NEAR's source documentation before planning their migration.) Archival data is essential for analytics tools, portfolio trackers, tax software, and blockchain explorers, use cases that have grown significantly in markets like India, where the government's crypto tax reporting requirements since 2022 have increased demand for historical on-chain data.

NEAR's current network metrics provide context for how much is at stake. As of May 2025, the network reported 46 million monthly active accounts and 16 million weekly active users, figures that surpassed Solana's reported weekly activity of 14.8 million. The NEAR token had been trading in a range of roughly $1.09 to $2.47 in recent months, with a circulating supply of approximately 1.22 billion tokens and a market cap in the $1.4B to $3.1B range. The network ranks around #55 by market cap on CoinGecko.

The Uneven Burden on South Asian and African Developers

NEAR operates regional ecosystem hubs in India and Kenya as part of its six global hubs, reflecting a genuine commitment to developer communities outside North America and Europe. But the practical impact of this deprecation falls harder on those same communities.

Developers in cost-sensitive markets have historically relied on free, well-documented endpoints precisely because commercial RPC providers (which charge based on request volume or compute units) represent a real operational cost for early-stage projects and hackathon teams. When near.org is listed as the default in tutorials and quickstart guides, that is the endpoint smaller teams use. Switching to a commercial provider requires awareness of the alternatives, time to evaluate pricing tiers, and in some cases, account setup and payment infrastructure that not every developer has readily available.

The good news is that the migration options are broader than they might appear. NEAR's official documentation now lists ten alternative providers. FASTNEAR, funded through the Infrastructure Committee's $4 million ecosystem allocation, offers fully free access with no stated request limits. Lava Network, another listed provider, offers free archival access with no setup requirements and operates a decentralized node model, meaning infrastructure operators in Africa could potentially participate as node providers themselves, turning this transition into an economic participation opportunity rather than simply a new cost.

What Comes Next

The Infrastructure Committee, a body backed by a $4 million fund with representatives from Aurora Labs, Pagoda, DevHub, Calimero, and the NEAR Foundation, has already moved beyond this deprecation in its planning. Reports point to a forthcoming 2026 roadmap focused on scaling chain abstraction infrastructure. The committee's work carries weight at the protocol's highest levels: NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin holds an ad-hoc seat, a signal of how seriously the organization regards its infrastructure decisions. Whether that roadmap includes sustained investment in regional developer support remains to be seen.

For developers currently building on NEAR in South Asia or Africa, the immediate action is straightforward: audit your RPC endpoint configuration and migrate before June 1. FASTNEAR is the lowest-friction free option. For projects with heavier archival data requirements, Lava Network's free tier warrants evaluation. The longer-term question, whether NEAR's push toward decentralized infrastructure actually improves conditions for independent builders in emerging markets or simply redistributes costs onto them, will take longer to answer.

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Sources: NEAR Protocol Blog, NEAR Documentation, Lava Network Blog, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, CoinLaw, NEAR Foundation