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.
A Tuesday announcement detailed that SovereignAI will adopt a crypto treasury strategy, intending to acquire up to 10% of the NEAR (NEAR) token supply. This initiative, in collaboration with the NEAR Foundation, positions OceanPal as a public vehicle for gaining exposure to the crypto protocol’s native token.
OceanPal emphasized that the partnership with the NEAR Foundation is built on a mutual vision of “universal AI sovereignty.”
NEAR, launched in 2020, is a layer-1 blockchain designed for AI applications, enabling AI agents to interact, manage assets, and function securely across networks, according to the project’s website.
This announcement follows a leadership change at OceanPal, which appointed former State Street executive Sal Ternullo as co-CEO, and David Schwed, formerly with BNY Mellon, Galaxy, and Robinhood, as 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 restructures as public benefit corporation, Microsoft secures 27% stake
The rise of AI agents in crypto
AI agents — autonomous systems capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting without human input — are increasingly integrating with crypto, utilizing blockchain networks to manage assets, validate actions, and operate as self-governing economic participants.
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 function effectively in financial markets.
During the same month, Cloudflare, a global cloud infrastructure provider, announced plans to introduce a new stablecoin called NET Dollar to facilitate instant transactions initiated by AI agents.
Recent data from Dune Analytics indicated that Coinbase’s AI-ready payments protocol, launched in May to allow autonomous agents to send and receive stablecoins online, experienced a transaction activity increase of over 10,000% in the past month.
This surge followed comments from two Coinbase developers in August, who asserted that AI agents are “about to become Ethereum’s biggest power users.”
Magazine: You should ‘go and build’ your own AI agent: Jesse Pollak, X Hall of Flame
