Author: Zen, PANews
In mid-October 2025, the NEAR Foundation, at a critical turning point in its ecological development, made one of the most significant senior personnel adjustments in recent years, appointing five senior industry professionals at once to oversee key areas such as product, business, marketing, technology, and human resources.
A management layer replacement covering multiple key areas is partly due to the scarce attention of developers and funding, as well as increasingly fierce competition among peers; on the other hand, it is also closely related to NEAR shifting its strategic focus towards products and ecosystems of "user-owned AI," attempting to truly bring years of technological reserves into scalable applications.
As Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR protocol, stated, the addition of five new executives will help transform technology into products, move beyond the Web3 circle, and promote the global implementation and popularization of AI-native products focused on privacy protection.