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$NEAR Surged 75% Despite the Broader Market Decline
NEAR Protocol and its native token rallied sharply amid a combination of short liquidations, renewed interest in AI-related crypto assets, and rising fee revenue from its cross-chain infrastructure.
Over the past seven days, NEAR Protocol gained around 50% and climbed toward the $2.73 level.
The rally began after the token finally broke out of a prolonged consolidation range. For most of May, $NEAR traded sideways between $1.20 and $1.75 with little momentum.
Once the breakout occurred, the market was quickly hit by a wave of short liquidations. According to analysts, traders lost more than $9.85 million on short positions, while forced buybacks accelerated the price surge even further.
The derivatives market also became significantly more active during the rally. Open interest first exceeded $473 million, and by May 24, futures open interest for $NEAR had already surpassed $720 million.
NEAR Protocol is now trading around $2.75 with a market capitalization of approximately $3.57 billion. Daily trading volume exceeds $1 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
$NEAR surged more than 75% over the past week. Source: CoinMarketCap.
Arthur Hayes Added $NEAR to His “Holy Trinity” of Altcoins
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, recently described NEAR Protocol, Hyperliquid ($HYPE), and Zcash ($ZEC) as his “holy trinity of altcoins.”
All three assets have recently outperformed Bitcoin. Hyperliquid reached a new all-time high, while Zcash climbed to multi-month highs.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, also discussed privacy infrastructure built on $NEAR during a conversation with Hayes.
Their discussion connected the current rally in NEAR Protocol, Hyperliquid, and Zcash to rising market interest in confidential computing and AI-agent infrastructure.
Notably, during one of $NEAR’s strongest rally days, roughly 78% of crypto tokens were reportedly declining, according to analysts.
Why Did $NEAR Start Rising?
Beyond the technical breakout, the market also found several fundamental reasons to support NEAR Protocol.
The first catalyst was the Intents cross-chain system within the $NEAR ecosystem. According to on-chain analyst 0xNairolf and DefiLlama, the system generated more than $33 million in fees in less than a year.
The $NEAR Intents system has already generated more than $33 million in fees and processed over $19 billion in volume. Source: DefiLlama.
The infrastructure processes swaps and cross-chain transfers across more than 35 blockchains. Since February 2026, transaction fees have also been automatically redirected toward buying back $NEAR tokens.
Analysts believe this created a continuous source of demand for the token.
More than $10 billion in cumulative volume and over 15.7 million swaps have already passed through $NEAR Intents.
Another important catalyst was $NEAR’s growing AI focus — backed by actual products rather than pure marketing narratives.
On May 20, NEAR Protocol introduced a system that removes passwords and personal information from prompts before they reach Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, or Google Gemini.
Developer Kent (@cuongdc_real) also stated on X that $NEAR AI upgraded its model selection system and added support for Google Gemma 4 31B.
The model operates through trusted execution environment infrastructure inside $NEAR and uses end-to-end encryption.
CoinMarketCap describes NEAR Protocol as a high-performance AI platform designed for next-generation decentralized applications and intelligent agents.
Co-founder Illia Polosukhin is also known as one of the co-authors of the landmark 2017 transformer architecture paper — the foundational technology behind most modern large language models today.
Risks Still Remain for Late Buyers
According to Token Terminal, daily active users on the $NEAR network dropped from nearly 3 million at the beginning of 2026 to around 266,000.
Analysts consider this a potentially concerning signal because the token’s price growth is currently outpacing actual on-chain activity.
At the same time, NEAR Protocol is preparing another major upgrade called dynamic resharding.
The technology is designed to automatically scale the network during periods of sharply rising demand.
If the upgrade performs as expected, $NEAR could not only sustain its current momentum but also strengthen interest from AI developers and enterprise users beyond the current market rally.
See also: "Total Stablecoin Market Capitalization Surpasses Historic Milestone"
