NEAR HZN Launches Chain Abstraction Accelerator for Teams Building New Cross-Chain Opportunities in DeFi

The NEAR Foundation is excited to announce the inaugural accelerator focused on Chain Abstraction. This kickoff cohort includes a select group of teams building new DeFi primitives and cross-chain capabilities using NEAR’s Chain Signatures and other components of its chain abstraction stack—and demonstrating the power of cross-chain interoperability and native asset composability  to drive user engagement and use cases.

The Web3 space today suffers from chronic fragmentation of liquidity and attention, but thanks to NEAR account aggregation and a scalable, fully sharded blockchain, developers can now unify liquidity and assets across chains. NEAR Chain Signatures enables novel primitives that also serve DeFi use cases across chains. Users can control accounts on other blockchains with their NEAR account, without having to wrap or bridge assets, unlocking true asset composability. NEAR is also the natural home for scalable on-chain AI use cases and powering the future AI economy with the next wave of DeFi. 

This accelerator aims to bring together top NEAR-native DeFi teams and support them to develop diverse, novel use cases and create new opportunities for degens from any native chain.

The cohort teams are:

• Atlas Protocol: Bitcoin liquid staking
• Omnilane: Cross-chain RFQ (request-for-quote) protocol
• Covenant Finance: Perpetual debt and fixed income products
• Templar Protocol: Zero-interest money market
• Vita Finance: Automated market maker 
• Kairo Money: Lending protocol
• Thunderhood: Leverage trading for memecoins
• Delta Trade: Grid trading bot on Telegram
• Allstake: Multi-asset re-staking

The HZN team is  also proud to have the partnership of supporting teams in the NEAR ecosystem to provide distribution and bootstrap liquidity on the primitives developed by the cohort. Those teams include Ref Finance, Burrow Cash, HOT, DapDap, and more.

NEAR’s chain abstraction accelerator builds on this year’s successful NEAR Horizon AI Incubator and NEAR x Delphi Labs AI Accelerator cohorts. As with the other cohorts, part of the goal for the accelerator is for teams to work together on building and problem-solving; for the Chain Abstraction cohort, this will involve creating experiences that span multiple teams’ apps and protocols–which means net-new opportunities to attract DeFi users and enthusiasts to NEAR.

Participating founders receive dedicated mentorship from notable founders and investors in the space, and seed round preparation, as well as high-quality collaborator referrals and collaboration on go-to-market, incentive programs, and use cases through a multi-month engagement. The inaugural cohort officially launches today, and officially wraps at the end of December, with dedicated support for each team through 2025.

Some members of the cohort will present a first look at their work November 9-11 at NEAR Foundation’s [REDACTED] event in Bangkok, Thailand, a major convening of the visionaries, builders, and developers shaping chain abstraction and user-owned AI on NEAR. 

Follow NEAR Protocol on X to stay up to date on the latest from the cohort including product demos,, mainnet launches, and the future of DeFi on NEAR.