Shipping giant OceanPal has announced a new subsidiary, that will be backed by a crypto treasury strategy. Called “Sovereign AI”, the AI-focused unit has adopted NEAR Protocol’s NEAR token as its treasury’s currency.
At the time of writing, NEAR was trading at $2.24 with a market cap of $2.87 billion. Moving forward, OceanPal is likely to acquire 10 percent of NEAR token’s total supply that presently stands at 1.27 billion.
“This is a public company launching as an active, strategic partner with the NEAR Foundation to advance a shared vision of universal AI sovereignty by leveraging the NEAR Protocol’s vertically integrated AI products and rails, which were purpose-built for these exact use cases,” said Sal Ternullo, OceanPal’s newly appointed co-CEO.
Through Sovereign AI, OceanPal aims to have enterprise-level AI solutiona designed to offer to corporates across the sectors of finance, healthcare, and media.
NEAR Protocol, meanwhile, is a layer-1 blockchain that functions as a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (dApps), founded in 2018. It was first conceived in 2017 as a machine learning project under the brand name “Near.ai”.
Owing to its AI-related roots, OceanPal said Near Protocol’s decentralized and confidential compute infrastructure can be leveraged to build privacy-first, regulatory compliant AI solutions for businesses.
“Sovereign AI is positioned at the convergence of two massive transformations – AI and digital ownership. Our strategy goes beyond treasury management to actively build the infrastructure enabling user-owned, privacy-preserving AI at scale,” said David Schwed, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of OceanPal noted.
The NEAR Protocol, OceanPal expects, will power AI agents to function as independent economic actors, enabling them to transact, manage assets, and make automated decisions.
“We are very pleased to welcome SovereignAI to the NEAR ecosystem. We believe the NEAR Protocol’s AI-centric tech stack will allow user-owned AI to meet its moment,” Illia Polosukhin, CEO and co-founder NEAR Foundation said as commenting on the development.