NEAR Cryptocurrency Surges 100% in a Month Amid the AI Boom

Over the past four weeks, the cryptocurrency $NEAR Protocol ($NEAR) has risen by almost 100%, and over the past week — by 55%, becoming one of the top gainers among major altcoins. The rally coincided with the announcement of a series of blockchain upgrades related to privacy, cross-chain transfers, protection of artificial intelligence (AI) users’ data, and network scaling.

For more than a year and a half, the $NEAR cryptocurrency had barely moved outside the range around $2. Over the past month, the situation has changed, and the asset rose sharply by almost 100% in May. The growth came amid technical upgrades.

Over the past four weeks, the cryptocurrency $NEAR Protocol ($NEAR) has risen by almost 100%, and over the past week — by 55%, becoming one of the top gainers among major altcoins. The rally coincided with the announcement of a series of blockchain upgrades related to privacy, cross-chain transfers, protection of artificial intelligence (AI) users’ data, and network scaling.

At the time of publication on May 27, $NEAR is trading around $2.55, while the token’s market capitalization stands at $3.3 billion. However, current prices are still eight times below the historical highs of 2022 — around $20.42. Since the beginning of 2025, the asset’s price had not changed significantly, remaining in a narrow range around $2. The price fell to these levels after two attempts in 2024 to rise above $8.

What Updates $NEAR Has

The main activity of the $NEAR team accompanying the current growth took place on May 20–22, when the project announced three major protocol upgrades at once.

The first update concerns the privacy of asset management, or Confidential Treasuries. It means that companies and funds can now conduct transactions, pay salaries, and manage assets across more than 35 blockchain networks without publicly disclosing the details.

$NEAR also provided specific data on this functionality. According to the project, $68 million was moved through Confidential Treasuries mechanisms over the past month. In essence, this feature is a direct response to the needs of large capital, which is not ready to expose its movements to public view. This product operates on the basis of the $NEAR Intents infrastructure, which allows transactions to be carried out across many separate blockchains.

Since the end of 2025, major players and industry experts have called blockchain transparency the main obstacle to institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies. It is stated that institutions need confidentiality of transactions and participants’ identities — available for audit by authorized persons but hidden from outsiders. Crypto industry veterans have called privacy the “next big bet” of the crypto industry, without which the transition from a speculative market to mass adoption is impossible.

Another update also relates to data privacy, but is aimed at AI users — AI Prompt Privacy. The $NEAR AI platform, which allows text, images, and voice to be processed in one interface, has added a feature for automatic data anonymization in prompts sent to popular models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

In other words, if a $NEAR AI user accidentally sends a password or financial data, it will not leak into the public domain or be used for other purposes: all information remains on the user’s device.

The third update concerns network scalability. $NEAR calls this modification “dynamic sharding,” where the network automatically divides into parallel segments to process tasks simultaneously.

Implementation of this part is planned for June. If it works as the developers claim, $NEAR will be able to process tens of thousands of transactions per second, making it one of the fastest and cheapest blockchains on the market.

Interest in $NEAR

However, the price is being driven not only by hype around AI and privacy. High transaction activity is being observed on the network. For example, the volume of operations conducted through the $NEAR Intents cross-chain infrastructure over the past 30 days exceeded $1.7 billion. The amount of user transaction fees collected by the project surpassed $32 million, whereas at the beginning of the year this figure was slightly below $15 million.

As experts from the analytics division of the crypto exchange BitMEX noted, the cost of $NEAR cross-chain operations is much lower than that of many competitors on the market.

There is also interest from institutional investors in exchange-traded products based on this cryptocurrency. $NEAR is represented by two European exchange-traded funds: from Bitwise and 21Shares. The total amount of assets under management as of May 27 is around $130 million: $72 million at Bitwise and $65 million at 21Shares. Both products have been traded on the European market since mid-2025.

Editor: Yulia Krasnaya

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