OceanPal Inc., which is listed on Nasdaq, has successfully secured $120 million through a private investment in public equity (PIPE) to establish SovereignAI, a new subsidiary aimed at commercializing the NEAR Protocol and building AI infrastructure.
In a Tuesday announcement, the company plans to adopt a crypto treasury strategy and aims to acquire up to 10% of the NEAR (NEAR) token supply. This initiative, developed in collaboration with the NEAR Foundation, positions OceanPal as a public entity offering exposure to the cryptocurrency protocol’s native token.
OceanPal emphasized that its partnership with the NEAR Foundation is rooted in a mutual aspiration for “universal AI sovereignty.”
NEAR, launched in 2020, is a layer-1 blockchain designed to support AI applications, enabling AI agents to interact, manage assets, and operate securely across networks, as stated on the project’s website.
This announcement aligns with a leadership transition at OceanPal, which appointed former State Street executive Sal Ternullo as co-CEO, and David Schwed, a former executive at BNY Mellon, Galaxy, and Robinhood, as chief operating officer.
Furthermore, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, will join the advisory board of SovereignAI, alongside Richard Muirhead of Fabric Ventures and Lukasz Kaiser of OpenAI, among others.
Related: OpenAI restructures as a public benefit corporation; Microsoft holds a 27% stake
The rise of AI agents in crypto
AI agents—autonomous systems capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting without human input—are increasingly converging with the crypto landscape, utilizing blockchain networks to manage assets, verify actions, and function as self-governing economic entities.
In September, John D’Agostino, head of institutional strategy at Coinbase, stated on CNBC’s Squawk Box that cryptocurrency is essential for AI agents to perform effectively in financial markets.
Also in September, Cloudflare, a global cloud infrastructure firm, announced plans to introduce a new stablecoin named NET Dollar to facilitate instant transactions initiated by AI agents.
Recent data from Dune Analytics highlighted that Coinbase’s AI-ready payments protocol, launched in May to enable autonomous agents to send and receive stablecoins online, experienced a surge in transaction activity exceeding 10,000% in the preceding month.
These figures surfaced after two Coinbase developers indicated in August that AI agents are “about to become Ethereum’s biggest power users.”
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