The new company will use NEAR’s blockchain and NVIDIA technology to build privacy-preserving AI infrastructure, while offering exposure to the NEAR token.
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Nasdaq-listed OceanPal Inc. has raised $120 million through a private investment in public equity deal to launch SovereignAI, a new subsidiary focused on commercializing the NEAR Protocol and developing AI infrastructure.
According to a Tuesday , SovereignAI will implement a crypto treasury strategy, with plans to acquire up to 10% of the NEAR (NEAR) token supply. The move, developed in partnership with the NEAR Foundation, makes OceanPal a public vehicle for exposure to the crypto protocol’s native token.
OceapPal said the partnership with the NEAR Foundation is based on a shared vision of “universal AI sovereignty.”
Launched in 2020, NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain supporting AI applications, allowing AI agents to interact, manage assets and operate securely across networks, to the project’s website.
The announcement coincides with a leadership shift at OceanPal, which appointed former State Street executive Sal Ternullo as co-CEO and David Schwed, previously with BNY Mellon, Galaxy and Robinhood, as chief operating officer.
Meanwhile, NEAR Foundation co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin will join the SovereignAI advisory board alongside Richard Muirhead of Fabric Ventures and Lukasz Kaiser of OpenAI, among others.
Related:
AI agents — , decide and act without human input — are increasingly merging with crypto, using blockchain networks to manage assets, verify actions and operate as self-governing economic participants.
In September, John D’Agostino, the head of institutional strategy at Coinbase, CNBC’s Squawk Box that to operate effectively in financial markets.
The same month, Cloudflare, a global cloud infrastructure company, announced plans to launch a to support instant transactions triggered by AI agents.
Recent from Dune Analytics revealed that Coinbase’s AI-ready payments protocol, launched in May to let online, had seen transaction activity surge over 10,000% in the past month.
Those numbers came after two Coinbase developers said in August that AI agents are “about to become .”
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