NEARCON 2026 puts AI front and center for the next wave of the open web

NEAR Protocol's flagship conference returned to the United States for the first time in years, landing at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco on February 23-24, 2026. The move from Lisbon was deliberate. NEAR wanted to be closer to the center of the AI revolution, and the conference's theme reflected that ambition: "Private. Intelligent. Yours."

The two-day, invite-only event gathered developers, founders, researchers, and investors to explore what happens when AI meets decentralized infrastructure. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin opened with a keynote on how NEAR AI and NEAR Intents are converging as a unified commerce layer, enabling AI agents to transact across asset types with secure, private infrastructure. His message was pointed: the next generation of AI products should be owned by their users, not the platforms that host them.

The speaker lineup drew from well beyond the crypto ecosystem. Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and CEO of Brave, spoke about privacy in the age of AI. A Google product lead for Web3 joined a Linux Foundation CTO to discuss how real autonomous systems are assembled and constrained in practice. An OpenAI researcher addressed the question of AI scale. Intel's software architect highlighted security requirements for AI systems running on decentralized networks.

Insights

Beyond the keynotes, a community choosing its moment

The invite-only format was a departure from previous NEARCONs, which had been open-registration events in cities like Lisbon, Bangkok, and Seoul. Organizers described the shift as "limited and curated," aiming to bring together people actively building rather than those browsing. The result was a smaller, more focused room where conversations carried more weight.

The theme of user-owned AI ran through nearly every session. Where most AI conferences in early 2026 focused on enterprise adoption or consumer productivity, NEARCON framed the conversation around a different question: who controls the intelligence? Speakers repeatedly returned to the idea that AI agents transacting on behalf of users should operate on open, permissionless infrastructure rather than within walled gardens controlled by a handful of companies.

Fort Mason itself added something to the atmosphere. The waterfront arts venue felt more intimate than a convention center, and the curated attendance meant that hallway conversations between sessions often continued the debates that started on stage. For a community that had spent most of the crypto winter building quietly, NEARCON 2026 felt like a deliberate step back into public view, timed to a moment when the AI conversation was shifting toward questions about ownership, privacy, and infrastructure that decentralized networks were built to answer.