NEAR tests AI delegates for DAO voting
NEAR Foundation is piloting AI agents that can vote on behalf of DAO members to boost participation in governance. Low turnout has long been a challenge in the industry, with decisions often shaped by the same small set of active wallets. NEAR believes that personal agents trained on user preferences can ease that friction and speed up decision‑making.
According to NEAR Foundation researcher Lane Rettig, the initiative is not meant to replace people with machines. The first versions will act like helpers: low‑autonomy chatbots that explain proposals in plain language, provide context, and help prepare a draft vote for the user to confirm.
The rollout will start with AI delegates representing groups of participants who share similar views, followed later by individual agents integrated for each user. The idea is to make voting more streamlined, aggregating known preferences upfront and tallying the result quickly.
Rettig stressed that human oversight will remain in place. Major decisions, including strategic changes or treasury allocations, will still require users to confirm votes manually. To keep agents aligned with the owner’s values, NEAR is exploring verifiable model training, which includes cryptographic proofs of data sources and training cycles. Signals could come from onboarding questionnaires, past voting history, and public messages in community channels.
Some of the NEAR infrastructure is already being trialed within the NEAR Digital Collective via Pulse, a tool that tracks community sentiment, summarizes discussions, and highlights priority topics. The next step will allow delegates not only to advise but also to form a position on behalf of larger participant clusters. The team believes this approach will reduce governance capture and accelerate final decision‑making.
NEAR’s approach follows a growing trend in crypto, with tens of thousands of AI agents already in use by 2025. The key question is how to balance speed and decentralization so that automation broadens participation rather than concentrating power among a narrow set of addresses.
Related article: Interview with Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol)
