Welcome to NEAR Shade Agents, a groundbreaking innovation from the NEAR ecosystem that brings decentralized, intelligent agents to Web3.

What Are NEAR Shade Agents?

Shade Agents are autonomous, persistent AI agents that live on-chain and can manage wallets, perform transactions, and interact with data and smart contracts — securely and independently.

They combine the best of two worlds:

• Trustless: Run inside secure hardware (TEEs — Trusted Execution Environments) that guarantees code integrity and confidentiality.
• Persistent: Thanks to NEAR Protocol’s decentralized key management, these agents don’t lose access to your account — even if they move to a new machine.

What Makes NEAR Shade Agents Different?

Most Web3 “agents” today fall into one of two camps:

🟣 Trustless but fragile — They run in TEEs, but if the machine shuts down, they lose access. 🟣 Persistent but centralized — Controlled by a single server or company, which introduces a single point of failure.

Shade Agents break that tradeoff. They are both:

• Trustless — running in verifiable, secure hardware.
• Persistent — with account access that lives on-chain, not on any specific device.

How Does NEAR Shade Agents Work?

Here’s the magic:

• A Shade Agent launches inside a secure enclave (TEE).
• It proves that its code is genuine and safe to run.
• Once verified, it can sign transactions and interact with contracts — without ever holding your private keys.
• Anyone can spin up the same agent elsewhere, and it’ll still have access — because Shade Agents are stateless.

No centralized server. No risk of key leakage. No lock-in.

NEAR Shade Agents: A New Class of dApps

Shade Agents enable a powerful new concept: Agentic Protocols.

Think of them as proactive, AI-powered apps — not just waiting for user input, but monitoring, thinking, and acting on-chain.

Imagine:

• An AI DeFi strategist optimizing your portfolio 24/7
• A cross-chain arbitrage agent seizing profitable trades
• A smart contract assistant that automates governance or DAO operations

All without trusting a company or server.

Why NEAR Shade Agents Matters

Shade Agents unlock the future of crypto:

• Verifiable — You know what code is running.
• Decentralized — No single point of failure or control.
• Secure — No keys are exposed, and everything runs in a trusted environment.
• Composable — They integrate seamlessly into any dApp.

It’s the intelligence of AI, the safety of crypto, and the resilience of the cloud — with none of the trust assumptions.

Welcome to the Shade NEAR Agents.

Ready to try it out? Join NEAR with Nightly, the wallet built for this new agentic future: 👉 Download Nightly