The NEAR token is now available for trading on Solana, powered by NEAR Intents and Orb Markets. This integration comes one day after Solana’s “Attention is All You Need” post that went viral, featuring Jensen Huang and Illia Polosukhin.
On December 18, Solana’s official account on X announced NEAR going live on its network. NEAR Protocol’s official account quoted the announcement, mentioning this integration is powered by NEAR Intents and Orb Markets. NEAR Intents is a cross-chain protocol that achieved significant volume and revenue growth in 2025, while Orb Markets is an innovative Solana explorer built by Helius Labs.
$NEAR, now on @Solana.
Powered by NEAR Intents × @Orb_Markets
— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) December 18, 2025
Mert, founder and CEO of Helius Labs, celebrated the integration, mentioning he tried to buy NEAR “two days ago” after a post where he praised NEAR’s development team, but it was not available on Solana at that time. “A million markets in your pockets,” he described Solana, followed by a new post showing his Solana wallet with ZEC, NEAR, SOL, and McDonald’s xStock, saying, “crazy you can hold all this on a single Solana private key.”
NEAR on Solana can be visualized on Orbs via the wrapped token address 3ZLekZYq2qkZiSpnSvabjit34tUkjSwD1JFuW9as9wBG, currently trading at $1.52, according to Orbs.
NEAR token address visualization, as of December 18, 2025 | Source: Orbs Market
Solana and NEAR Collaboration: Attention Is All You Need
Everything started gaining traction on December 16, when Mert posted that “NEAR is a top 2-3 underrated team in crypto,” comparing its technical talent to Solana, in particular tracing a parallel between Illia Polosukhin, NEAR co-founder, and Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana co-founder.
NEAR seems to me a top 2-3 underrated team in crypto
it's the only technical team as talented as Solana with the results to show for it, v smart devs
it is also still founder-led with Illia (the guy who helped invent LLMs)
if their GTM gets fixed, no reason why it's not top 10
— mert | helius.dev (@0xMert_) December 16, 2025
Other prominent figures connected to Solana joined Mert. For example, Double Zero’s co-founder and former Strategy lead at Solana, Austin Federa, praised both NEAR Intents and NEAR’s AI products, also bringing Illia’s name to the table.
Near has consistently reinvented their product in source of PMF with a discipline not often found in crypto.
Intents are cool. It’s made possible by an awesome mpc network under the hood.
Their AI work is the only AI x Crypto thing I’m looking forwards to. Nice job…
— Austin Federa | 🇺🇸 (@Austin_Federa) December 16, 2025
On December 17, Alex Svanevik, CEO of NansenAI, said he “just bought some NEAR,” adding that he “can’t take missing out on another ZEC,” in reference to Mert’s role in pushing Zcash’s privacy and ZEC price through continuous support and active posting on X, as Coinspeaker reported before its remarkable rally.
just bought some near
I can’t take missing out on another zec
— Alex Svanevik 🐧 (@ASvanevik) December 17, 2025
Then, Solana’s official account posted a photo of Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, touching Illia’s arm in a conference panel, with the caption “Attention is All You Need.” Illia is the co-author of Attention is All You Need, the revolutionary 2017 Google paper that introduced the transformer architecture, the core tech behind the AI boom—called the “T” in “ChatGPT.”
This post got a response from Polosukhin, sharing an old picture of him listening to Yakovenko’s explanation in front of a whiteboard, suggesting the two founders and projects have maintained a good relationship for years.
You have my attention
— Illia (root.near) (🇺🇦, ⋈) (@ilblackdragon) December 17, 2025
As things develop, Solana and NEAR break a paradigm of hostile competition in crypto, opening the doors for an era of collaboration in endeavors that are mutually beneficial, with the notion of the chains and infrastructures abstracted to the end user, who can access both assets and ecosystems natively in their wallets of choice.
Vini Barbosa has covered the crypto industry professionally since 2020, summing up to over 10,000 hours of research, writing, and editing related content for media outlets and key industry players. Vini is an active commentator and a heavy user of the technology, truly believing in its revolutionary potential. Topics of interest include blockchain, open-source software, decentralized finance, and real-world utility.
