NEAR Protocol used TOKEN2049 Dubai (April 30-May 1, 2025) to sharpen its positioning as an AI-native blockchain, placing its most senior executives across keynotes, panels, and side events attended by roughly 15,000 people from more than 150 countries. The Madinat Jumeirah conference has become the most commercially significant crypto gathering outside the US and Singapore, drawing institutional capital and regulatory interest from across the Gulf, South Asia, and beyond.

Polosukhin, who is both NEAR's co-founder and a co-author of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that underpins modern large language models, delivered a keynote titled "Building the Blockchain for AI."

His central argument: as AI becomes embedded in everyday infrastructure, blockchains can serve as the trust layer that keeps that infrastructure transparent and accountable. "AI becomes digital infrastructure and blockchain serves as the trust layer that makes it accountable, transparent, and aligned," he said during the keynote. He also put a long-range number on the table: by 2040, sovereign AI agents (autonomous software that manages tasks and transactions on behalf of users) could coordinate a significant portion of global activity.

The project's framing throughout the conference was "User-Owned AI": AI agents that run privately, keep user data encrypted, and work for users rather than extracting value from them.

Polosukhin has been direct about the alternative. "We're effectively in like 1984 style, the George Orwell book, where your phone is telling you what to do," he said in a TheStreet Crypto interview, referring to the current centralised AI landscape.

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The Telco Angle Is the Story Most Outlets Missed

While the AI keynote anchored NEAR's public-facing narrative at the event, the more structurally significant session may have been a panel at the Staking Summit, a side event held alongside TOKEN2049 Dubai.

NEAR Foundation CFO David Norris joined representatives from Deutsche Telekom, Saudi Telecom Bahrain, and Vodafone Group on a panel titled "Telcos as Web3 Infrastructure Titans." The discussion centred on whether telecom operators could function as Web3 infrastructure providers, specifically as blockchain node operators.

Validator nodes are the servers that process and confirm transactions on a proof-of-stake network like NEAR. Validator sets on most major layer-one networks have historically tended to be dominated by crypto-native entities and dedicated staking firms.

Bringing in regulated telecoms (which already operate data centres, hold customer trust, and navigate complex regulatory environments) would change the composition of that validator set in ways that analysts argue matter for network decentralisation and governance diversity.

For the Gulf specifically, where telecoms including Saudi Telecom and operators across Bahrain are already exploring blockchain for payments and identity, the distance between discussion and deployment may be shorter than in other regions, though no formal deployment commitments were announced at the conference.

Also at the Staking Summit: a new product collaboration between Openmesh Network and DappNode was announced, aimed at making it simpler for non-technical operators to run NEAR validator nodes. Developer Claudio Cossio led a hands-on workshop on running NEAR validator nodes at the conference.

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On-Chain Numbers Provide Context

At the time of TOKEN2049 Dubai, NEAR's token was trading at approximately $1.05. Its total value locked (TVL) in decentralised finance protocols was roughly $154-$160 million, according to DeFiLlama. The figure is comparatively modest against larger layer-one networks, though NEAR's own growth narrative has centred on user activity and chain abstraction rather than DeFi capital accumulation.

Monthly active users stood at 46 million in May 2025. NEAR attributes this figure in part to its chain abstraction architecture, which lets users interact with multiple blockchains without managing separate wallets or gas tokens.

Block times run at 600 milliseconds with 1.2-second finality, underpinned by Nightshade 2.0, the sharding upgrade NEAR deployed through 2024. Nine shards were active on mainnet as of the conference. In a testnet environment in December 2025, the protocol recorded one million transactions per second, well above Visa's estimated peak capacity of 65,000 TPS, though testnet figures don't translate directly to live network conditions.

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Why This Matters Outside the US

For South Asian and African readers, a few details in NEAR's Dubai positioning are worth tracking. South Asia recorded roughly $300 billion in on-chain transaction volume in the first seven months of 2025, an 80% year-on-year increase per TRM Labs, making it the fastest-growing crypto region globally. Sub-Saharan Africa received $205 billion in on-chain value between mid-2024 and mid-2025, up 52% year-on-year.

NEAR's sub-$0.01 transaction fees (per NEAR's own documentation) and its chain abstraction layer (which removes the need for users to hold multiple gas tokens) make it practically usable for high-frequency, low-value transactions that characterise retail crypto usage across both regions.

Analysts tracking NEAR's validator strategy have noted that telecom operators in South Asia and Africa already hold existing last-mile infrastructure, giving the validator node narrative developing in the Gulf a natural extension into those markets.

NEAR's research head Lane Rettig also spoke at TOKEN2049 Dubai on the decentralised AI-powered internet, and the project participated in the Scaling DeAI Summit alongside investment firm 499, KiteAI, and HETU.

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The Dubai conference marked a public consolidation of NEAR's AI pivot rather than a new announcement, with the project using the event to reinforce a positioning it has been building throughout the past year.

What comes next, whether the telco validator conversations convert into actual node operations, and whether the sovereign agent roadmap produces deployable infrastructure, will determine whether TOKEN2049 Dubai was a genuine inflection point or a well-staged pitch.