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Smart contracts run inside a deterministic VM and pay gas for every instruction. That makes some workloads impractical (heavy cryptography, ML inference) and others outright impossible (HTTP requests, accessing API keys, generating true randomness). Off-chain compute moves these workloads outside the chain while keeping cryptographic proof that the right code ran on the right inputs. On NEAR, this is typically achieved with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) — secure enclaves (e.g. Intel TDX) that produce signed attestations of execution.
A TEE attestation proves three things: the code that ran (hash of the binary), the inputs it received, and the output it produced — all signed by hardware the operator cannot tamper with.

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What it unlocks

  • HTTP requests — fetch from any Web2 API directly from contract logic.
  • Secrets management — encrypted API keys and private keys, only decrypted inside the enclave.
  • Verifiable randomness (VRF) — provably-fair random numbers signed with Ed25519.
  • AI integration — call LLMs and ML models with a proof the result is genuine.
  • Cross-chain reads — query Ethereum or other chains without a bridge contract.
  • Heavy cryptography — zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, custom signature schemes.

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How it integrates with NEAR

A contract calls into the off-chain layer using NEAR’s yield/resume mechanism: the contract pauses, the off-chain worker executes the code in a TEE, then resolves the promise with the result and its attestation — all within a single logical transaction. For workloads that don’t need a contract at all, the same compute can also be triggered via direct HTTPS, which is useful for Web2 backends or frontends.

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Platforms

OutLayer

A verifiable off-chain compute platform for NEAR by FastNEAR. Code runs in Intel TDX enclaves with built-in support for VRF, secrets, MPC vaults, and payment keys.