The Mediator: NEAR CTO Eric Winer on our AI-Agent Future

At a time when countless crypto projects are awkwardly pivoting toward artificial intelligence, Eric Winer has spent over a decade building bridges between cutting-edge technology and everyday users. Now, as CTO of NEAR AI, he's pursuing a vision where AI agents negotiate, communicate, and transact on our behalf — a vision that could fundamentally reshape how we interact with the digital world.Winer speaks with the measured enthusiasm of someone who has repeatedly been early to technological revolutions. Having joined the Winklevoss twins as Gemini's first engineer in 2013 and helped launch one of the earliest NFT marketplaces before the term "NFT" became commonplace, he now confronts what may be his most ambitious challenge: creating a decentralized ecosystem of AI agents that preserves user sovereignty in an increasingly AI-mediated future source: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-toronto-2025-coverage/2025/04/24/the-mediator-near-cto-eric-winer-on-our-ai-agent-future