NEAR Protocol Uses Seoul Conference to Push AI-Privacy Case, With a Mental Health App Leading the Charge
A hackathon winner built to help users in stigma-heavy markets access therapy anonymously became the defining story of NEAR's week at BUIDL Asia 2025.
A mental health AI assistant designed to keep therapy sessions invisible to any third party (including the platform running it) took the top prize at the BUIDL AI Hackathon in Seoul last April, in what organizers framed as a showcase of where AI and blockchain infrastructure are heading together. The project, called "Cure Me Baby," ran on NEAR Protocol and used Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs, secure hardware enclaves that process data without exposing it to the host system) to ensure that no conversation record could be accessed, leaked, or sold. It won both Best Use Case and Best Overall Project at BUIDL Asia 2025, held April 15 to 16 at the Signiel Hotel in Seoul's Songpa District, the sixth annual edition of the conference.
NEAR co-hosted the Open Source AI Summit at the event alongside its affiliated NEAR AI research arm, and sponsored the hackathon that drew more than 30 submissions. More than a third of those projects were built directly on NEAR's infrastructure, a signal the protocol is actively courting developer mindshare in East Asia.
Why Privacy Architecture Matters Here
The "Cure Me Baby" team explicitly cited stigma around mental health treatment in Asian communities, the cost of professional therapy, and fears about data confidentiality as the core problems they were solving. Those barriers aren't abstract in much of South and Southeast Asia. Mental health infrastructure in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka is chronically underfunded, and digital health tools face an additional credibility gap. Users have limited reason to trust that session data won't be stored, shared with insurers, or accessed by governments.
TEE-based processing sidesteps that concern at the architecture level: the model runs inside a sealed hardware environment, and even the server operator cannot read what's inside. Billing in the prototype ran through a NEAR wallet, which is relevant in markets where Ethereum's high gas fees make micropayment subscription models economically unworkable. NEAR's per-transaction costs have consistently stayed below one cent following protocol upgrades earlier in 2025.
The Broader NEAR AI Argument
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin used the Open Source AI Summit keynote to make the case that decentralized infrastructure is a prerequisite for equitable AI access. "AI is not just powerful, but also equitable," he said, a message that sits alongside his more pointed writing on the subject: "We do not want to live in a world where a few mega-corporations control the most powerful human resource: intelligence."
Polosukhin's background gives this framing more technical grounding than the average Layer-1 pitch. He is one of the eight co-authors of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper from Google Research, the foundational work behind the transformer architecture that underpins most major large language model architectures today. In March 2025, a month before BUIDL Asia, he presented research on confidential, decentralized AI computation at NVIDIA's GTC AI Conference.
NEAR's formal R&D lab, NEAR.AI, has been building open-source tools for AI agent coordination (covering data collection, compute access, model training verification, and agent-to-agent communication), all governed outside any single corporate entity. The lab provides grant-accessible infrastructure for developers working in this space, which matters for builders in emerging markets who can't access or afford proprietary AI APIs.
On-Chain Context
NEAR's network reported roughly 46 million monthly active users in Q2 2025, with around 16 million weekly active users. The ecosystem counted over 2,500 active developers monthly according to Electric Capital's 2025 report. DeFi total value locked (TVL) on NEAR averaged around $154 to $160 million through 2025, per DefiLlama. The network's Nightshade sharding architecture delivers block finality in approximately 1.2 seconds. Cross-chain integrations with Stellar and Sui went live during 2025 under NEAR's "Intents" framework, which routes user actions across chains without requiring users to manage multiple wallets manually.
NEAR's token (NEAR) has not recovered to its all-time high of $20.44. As of late February 2026, prices across aggregators varied significantly, and the token should be treated as still well below its peak valuation.
Conference Signals Worth Watching
Other notable moments at BUIDL Asia included NEAR Foundation's Lane Rettig moderating a panel on futarchy (a governance model that uses prediction markets to evaluate policy decisions) and speaking separately on whether Ethereum can regain its competitive position. Altan Tutar of MoreMarkets argued that crypto's technical modularity era is giving way to vertically integrated protocol stacks. "Crypto isn't modular anymore, it's vertical," Tutar said, reflecting a wider industry shift toward prioritizing coherent user experience over theoretical composability.
NEAR also co-hosted a networking event with South Korean Web3 venture firm Hashed, reinforcing its position in the regional investment ecosystem.
Looking further out, NEAR's December 2025 partnership with the ADI Foundation (which connects over 50 institutions in real estate, energy, and payments) includes active discussions to bring African mobile payment infrastructure on-chain. Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa collectively drove a 19.4% year-on-year increase in regional crypto adoption last year, the fastest growth rate of any region globally. NEAR's integration with Stellar may be worth tracking as that work develops.
Price data referenced in this article reflects figures available at time of writing. Verify current NEAR token pricing and TVL via CoinGecko and DefiLlama directly before drawing investment conclusions.