Introduction

NEARON turns staked NEAR into AI spend. You stake NEAR, keep a liquid token for it, and the yield pays for AI models at NEAR AI.

NEAR AI runs a staking farm that pays its yield as AI spend instead of more NEAR. NEARON pools everyone's NEAR into that farm through the aiNEAR contract, splits the yield fairly between holders, and turns each holder's share into a spend limit on their own NEAR AI API key. Your principal stays staked and stays yours; only the yield is spent on AI.

Why it matters

• AI without selling NEAR. Your stake pays for inference every second it stays staked.
• Liquid. aiNEAR is a normal NEAR token: hold it, send it, or put it in a pool, and the yield follows the holder.
• Your own key. Credit becomes the spend limit of a NEAR AI key only you can decrypt. No one proxies or reads your requests.
• Checkable. Every unit of yield is on chain, and the app reconciles the contracts against NEAR AI on every page load.

Start here

Testnet. NEARON runs on NEAR testnet and the NEAR AI staging cloud. Numbers on these pages use the mainnet farm rate where noted.

Quickstart

From a NEAR wallet to your first AI reply in four steps.

1. Stake NEAR. On Stake, connect a wallet and stake at least 1 NEAR. You receive the same amount of aiNEAR, which starts earning reward units right away.
2. Add your earnings to AI balance. Press Add earned CREDIT. One transaction claims everything you have earned and records it as a top-up. CREDIT you already hold can be added the same way.
3. Create an API key. In the AI Console, open Manage API keys and sign one message in your wallet. No gas. The key is shown once; this browser keeps a copy. See API keys and spend limits.
4. Chat or call the API. Pick a model and send a message, or use the key from your own code. Each request spends AI balance by the tokens it uses. See Call the API.

Credit lags a few minutes. A new top-up reaches your key's spend limit on the issuer's next sync, at most about 5 minutes later.

aiNEAR

aiNEAR is the liquid receipt for NEAR staked through NEARON: 1 aiNEAR is always 1 NEAR in the farm.

How it works

When you call deposit_and_stake with NEAR attached, the aiNEAR contract stakes it in NEAR AI's credits farm and, once the farm confirms, mints you the same amount of aiNEAR. If the farm refuses the stake, the NEAR is refunded in full.

The farm pays yield as reward units, not as more NEAR. The principal never grows, so aiNEAR never changes price against NEAR. The yield travels separately, as CREDIT.

Properties

• Standard token. NEP-141, 24 decimals. Wallets, DEXs and other contracts can hold and move it.
• Yield follows the holder. Whoever holds aiNEAR earns on it from that moment on. Earlier earnings stay with the previous holder (how).
• Minimum stake. 1 NEAR per deposit. A first deposit also pays a small storage fee for your aiNEAR balance.
• Redeemable. Burn aiNEAR with unstake to get the NEAR back after the farm's unstake delay.

Reward units

A reward unit is the yield NEAR AI's farm pays for staked NEAR. One unit converts to $1 of AI.

Where they come from

To the farm there is a single staker: the aiNEAR pool. The farm counts units for the pool by staked amount × time × rate, writes the running total on chain, and NEAR AI balances the same amount to the pool's NEAR AI organization. The on-chain units and the organization's balance are two records of the same money.

The pool pulls the latest total from the farm with sync_from_farm. Anyone may call it; the gateway does every hour, and every deposit, unstake and claim syncs from the farm first. New units are then split over all aiNEAR, as How rewards accrue explains.

Rate and conversion

The rate is not ours. NEAR AI sets both the farm rate and the conversion, and can change either. Your principal is unaffected; your future AI balance is.

How rewards accrue

aiNEAR splits reward units by balance × time with one global number, so every holder's share costs the same to compute however many holders there are.

The accumulator

The contract keeps acc_per_share: how many units one aiNEAR has earned since the start. On each farm sync it adds new units ÷ aiNEAR supply. Each account stores three numbers:

claimable = earned + balance × (acc_per_share − checkpoint)

Settlement

Settling an account moves its accrued part into earned and its checkpoint to the current accumulator. The contract settles both sides before every balance change (mint, burn, transfer, ft_transfer_call, refunds) and before every claim. So:

• Units synced from the farm before a transfer stay with the sender, claimable any time. Units the farm paid but nobody has synced yet go to whoever holds the aiNEAR at the next sync (the gateway syncs hourly).
• The receiver earns from the moment the aiNEAR arrives.
• No unit can be claimed twice: a claim moves the checkpoint to now.

CREDIT

CREDIT is claimed yield as a token: 1 CREDIT is 1 reward unit, worth $1 of AI balance when burned for a top-up.

How it works

claim on aiNEAR syncs from the farm, settles you, and mints all your claimable units as CREDIT to your wallet. Only the aiNEAR contract can mint CREDIT; nobody else, including the gateway, can create it.

CREDIT is a standard NEP-141 token with 24 decimals. You can keep it, send it, or burn it for AI balance later with burn_for_api (see AI balance and top-ups). If you only want AI balance, skip CREDIT entirely: claim_and_topup mints and burns in one step.

Why claims are pulled, not pushed

A contract cannot send tokens to thousands of holders in one transaction. Letting each holder claim when they want costs no gas for anyone else and never misses anyone.

CREDIT does not hold value by itself. It is only redeemable for AI balance through a top-up. What CREDIT buys depends on NEAR AI's conversion and prices.

AI balance and top-ups

AI balance is the dollar balance your API key can spend. It grows with top-ups: numbered on-chain records of CREDIT burned for AI.

Making a top-up

Each top-up gets an id, an account and an amount, recorded by the CREDIT contract. The key issuer reads top-ups in id order, so a restart or retry never credits one twice.

Balance

AI balance = Σ top-ups − $0.001 per top-up − spent by your keys

The issuer turns that into the spend limit of your current key on its next sync: when a new top-up appears, and at least every 5 minutes. NEAR AI enforces the limit on every request.

API keys and spend limits

Your API key is a NEAR AI key issued for your NEAR account, whose spend limit is your AI balance. Only your browser ever sees it.

How a key is issued

1. Your browser makes a fresh P-256 key pair and asks you to sign a NEP-413 message naming your account and that public key. Signing costs no gas.
2. The gateway checks the signature and passes the request to the issuer, a program running in a trusted execution environment (Intel TDX) on OutLayer. The issuer holds NEAR AI admin rights that nobody can read out. Whoever can publish a new issuer version on OutLayer decides what code uses them, so publishing is a trust point like the contract owner key.
3. The issuer verifies the signature again, creates a NEAR AI key with your spend limit, revokes your previous key, and encrypts the new key to your browser's public key.
4. Your browser decrypts it. The gateway only ever relays ciphertext.

Rules

• One key per account. Creating a key replaces the old one; spending on the old key still counts against your AI balance.
• Shown once. Copy it when it appears. This browser keeps a copy for the AI Console; another browser needs a new key.
• Direct calls. Requests go from you to NEAR AI with the key. NEARON does not proxy, log or see them.
• Hard limit. When your AI balance runs out NEAR AI refuses requests until the next top-up syncs.

Treat the key like a password. Anyone with it can spend your AI balance until you create a new key, which revokes the old one.

Models and pricing

Your AI balance works on every chat model NEAR AI serves, priced per input and output token.

The model list and prices come from NEAR AI and are shown in the AI Console. A request costs input tokens × input price + output tokens × output price, deducted from your key's spend limit by NEAR AI.

Staging prices on 31 Oct 2026. Check the console for current prices.

Private models

Models marked Private are open models NEAR AI serves from GPUs inside a trusted execution environment, with attestation that the hardware and model are what they claim. Other models are routed to their providers.

Unstaking

Unstaking burns aiNEAR and returns the NEAR after the farm's unstake delay. Rewards earned up to that moment stay yours.

How it works

1. unstake(amount) syncs from the farm and settles you, so every unit earned so far is kept in earned.
2. It burns the aiNEAR and unstakes the same NEAR from the farm. If the farm refuses, your aiNEAR is minted back.
3. The NEAR is queued with an unlock epoch: the farm's delay, counted from the next epoch. On mainnet the delay is 4 epochs, about two days.
4. After the unlock epoch, withdraw pays out every matured amount, pulling NEAR back from the farm if needed.

Queued NEAR earns nothing. You can still claim the units you earned before unstaking at any time.

No instant exit. The contract cannot shorten the farm's delay. For an instant exit you need someone who will take your aiNEAR, for example in a pool.

Yield sub-pools

A yield sub-pool lets a contract that holds aiNEAR for many others pass its reward units on to them by shares, while it keeps the aiNEAR.

An NFT contract holding the NEAR staked for each pet, or the RHEA DCL contract holding the aiNEAR of every meme pool, earns units like any holder. But contracts never claim, so without sub-pools those units would sit unused under the contract's name.

Roles

How it works

A sub-pool is a second reward-per-share accumulator inside aiNEAR. When the holder settles, its units feed the sub-pool instead of its own balance, and each beneficiary settles against the sub-pool. Each step costs the same however many beneficiaries there are. Units the holder earned before opening its sub-pool move into it too.

A share change syncs from the farm first, so units synced before the change follow the old shares. If the farm cannot be read, the change is dropped and the deposit refunded; so is a change whose sender stopped being the reward router while it was in flight. Shares are 24-decimal amounts, like the NEAR or aiNEAR they stand for.

The JustHoot router writes DCL shares hourly, before each farm sync, because DCL cannot call aiNEAR itself. See Use cases and Keys for a beneficiary.

Who uses NEARON

Every use case is the same mechanism: stake once, and the yield pays someone's AI.

Call the API

Your key works with any OpenAI-compatible client. Point it at NEAR AI's base URL and pick a model.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://cloud-stg-api.near.ai/v1", api_key="sk-…")
r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
)
print(r.choices[0].message.content)

The Integration dialog in the AI Console has the same sample in curl and JavaScript, and one-line setup for Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode.

Errors

• Spend limit exceeded. Your AI balance is used up, or a new top-up has not synced yet. Top up, then wait up to 5 minutes.
• Unauthorized. The key was revoked because a newer key was created. Use the newest key.

Keys for a beneficiary

A beneficiary cannot sign, so whoever holds its registered public key requests the key and spends its AI balance.

1. Anyone calls claim_and_topup_for(beneficiary) (the reward router at any amount, others from 0.1 unit). CREDIT records a top-up marked kind: "beneficiary".
2. The key holder signs a NEP-413 message for recipient ainear-issuer with the registered key:

   Get my aiNEAR API key
   account: <signer account, as the wallet names it>
   for: <beneficiary id>
   browser key: <sha256 of the browser's P-256 key>

3. It posts the signature to /auth/near with "beneficiary": "<beneficiary id>".
4. The issuer checks that the signing key is the one aiNEAR registers for the beneficiary (get_yield_position) and issues a key whose spend limit is the beneficiary's top-ups.

The issuer keeps a beneficiary's AI balance under yield:<id>, apart from any person whose account has the same id. Only beneficiary top-ups fund it.

When an NFT changes hands, the NFT contract (as reward router) calls set_yield_pubkey to clear or replace the key. On its next sync the issuer revokes the API key issued to the old public key, and the new owner can request one once their key is registered. Revocation is not instant: the old API key keeps working until that sync (every 5 minutes, longer if the issuer, RPC or NEAR AI is down), and if the NFT contract's call to aiNEAR fails, the old key stays registered until the contract retries.

Only ed25519 public keys are accepted, the kind the issuer verifies.

Contract reference

The public methods of aiNEAR and CREDIT. Both are also standard NEP-141 tokens.

aiNEAR

Yield sub-pools (on aiNEAR)

CREDIT

Minting (mint, mint_and_burn_for_api, mint_and_burn_for_beneficiary) is callable only by the aiNEAR contract.

Parameters and addresses

Parameters

Testnet deployment

Roles and permissions

Who can do what, and what nobody can do.

The owner key is the main trust point. Whoever can upgrade the contracts could change these rules. It belongs in a hardware wallet or multisig before mainnet.

Reserve checks

Four equations that must always hold. The app checks them on every load and shows the result in the footer.

Check 04 can only fail if someone spends the pool's NEAR AI Cloud balance outside the issuer, or NEAR AI changes the conversion. Open Reserve check at the bottom of any page to see the live numbers.

Risks

What you rely on when you stake through NEARON.

Smart contract risk

A bug in aiNEAR or CREDIT could lose funds or units. NEARON is a testnet prototype; the contracts are tested but not yet ready for mainnet value.

Upgrade risk

The owner can upgrade the contracts. See Roles and permissions.

NEAR AI dependency

NEAR AI sets the farm rate, the unit conversion and model prices, and can pause the farm. Your NEAR stays redeemable, but your AI balance could buy less, or stop growing.

Unstake delay

Getting NEAR back takes the farm's delay (about two days on mainnet). Queued NEAR earns nothing.

Issuer and TEE

Keys are issued by code in a TEE on OutLayer. If it is unavailable, existing keys keep working but new keys and new top-ups wait.

Key exposure

Your key lives in your browser's storage. Anyone who copies it can spend your AI balance until you create a new key.

Burns are final

CREDIT burned for a top-up cannot be turned back into CREDIT, and AI balance is not refundable as NEAR.

Sub-pool shares

A reward router decides the split between beneficiaries. A wrong split moves AI balance between them; it cannot take the holder's aiNEAR.

FAQ

Can I lose my staked NEAR?

Only through a contract or farm failure. The yield, not the principal, pays for AI.

Can a sub-pool take over someone's account?

No. Beneficiary ids sit under their holder's name, and their AI balance lives under yield:<id>, apart from any person's.

Can a router take funds?

It cannot touch principal: it writes shares for the one holder it was named for. It does control that holder's beneficiaries' AI balance, since it registers their keys, so pick a router you trust with it.

Can shares block DCL swaps?

No. Shares never limit the holder's transfers, and distribution never fails inside a transfer.

Does a former pet owner keep its key?

Not for long. The NFT contract clears the pet's public key on transfer, and the issuer revokes the API key issued to a public key once the chain no longer registers it, on its next sync. Until then the old key can still spend the pet's AI balance.

Glossary

aiNEAR

Liquid receipt for NEAR staked through NEARON, 1:1. More

Farm

NEAR AI's staking contract that pays reward units instead of NEAR.

Reward unit

The farm's yield; 1 unit = $1 of AI. More

Farm sync

Pulling new units from the farm into the accumulator (sync_from_farm).

Accumulator

acc_per_share: units earned per aiNEAR since the start. More

Settle

Moving an account's accrued units into earned and its checkpoint to now.

CREDIT

Claimed units as a token. More

Top-up

A numbered record of CREDIT burned for AI balance. More

Spend limit

The most a NEAR AI key may spend: your AI balance. More

Issuer

The TEE program that creates keys and sets spend limits.

Sub-pool

A holder's second accumulator that splits its units by shares. More

Beneficiary, public key, reward router

Who receives sub-pool units, the key that spends them, and who writes the shares and keys.