OceanPal Inc., listed on Nasdaq, has secured $120 million via a private investment in public equity deal to establish SovereignAI, a new subsidiary aimed at commercializing the NEAR Protocol and building AI infrastructure.
In a Tuesday announcement, SovereignAI plans to adopt a crypto treasury strategy, with intentions 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 crypto protocol’s native token.
OceanPal stated that its partnership with the NEAR Foundation reflects a mutual commitment to “universal AI sovereignty.”
Founded in 2020, NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain designed to support AI applications, enabling AI agents to interact, manage assets, and operate securely across various networks, as noted on the project’s website.
This announcement comes alongside changes in leadership at OceanPal, which has appointed former State Street executive Sal Ternullo as co-CEO and David Schwed, formerly of BNY Mellon, Galaxy, and Robinhood, as the chief operating officer.
Additionally, 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: OpenAI transforms into a public benefit corporation, Microsoft secures a 27% stake
The rise of AI agents in crypto
AI agents—autonomous systems capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting independently of human intervention—are increasingly integrating with crypto, 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 effectively operate within financial markets.
Simultaneously, Cloudflare, a global cloud infrastructure firm, announced plans to launch a new stablecoin called NET Dollar to facilitate immediate transactions triggered by AI agents.
Recent data from Dune Analytics indicated that Coinbase’s AI-ready payments protocol, introduced in May for enabling autonomous agents to send and receive stablecoins online, experienced a transaction activity increase of over 10,000% in the previous month.
This surge followed comments from two Coinbase developers in August, asserting that AI agents are “on the verge of becoming Ethereum’s largest power users.”
Magazine: You should ‘go and build’ your own AI agent: Jesse Pollak, X Hall of Flame
