NEAR Protocol has climbed more than 80% in seven days — from roughly $2.20 to $4.20 — and is up over 150% in a month. The trigger was September 17, when confidential perpetual futures went live on near.com in partnership with Hyperliquid. The trading is private by default: positions are not publicly linked to the trader’s identity, and access runs across more than 30 chains.
In a market where every move lands on a block explorer, that is like adding a private VIP entrance to a stadium where 60,000 people watch every touch of the ball. The Confidential Intents pipeline crossed $70 million in total value locked, automatically activating NEAR’s @3.33 incentive program. A product launch, real on-chain activity and rewards hit the market like a well-cut trailer — and NEAR is right now one of the strongest movers among the top 30 coins.
What Is NEAR Protocol?
NEAR is a Layer 1 blockchain launched in 2020, built on a Proof-of-Stake consensus and its own sharding technology called Nightshade. The goal was simple but ambitious: build a chain that scales — up to a million transactions per second — while staying cheap and easy to use. In practice, that means NEAR does not charge five dollars per transfer like some older chains, but a fraction of a cent.
Behind the project are Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov. Polosukhin is not an anonymous forum ghost — he is one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need”, the 2017 paper that defined the transformer architecture. That is the same document without which ChatGPT, Claude and every other large language model would not exist. In other words, the man who helped invent the AI era is now building the railway those very models will ride on.
NEAR has also collected a serious investor list — a16z, Tiger Global, Coinbase Ventures — and today it increasingly positions itself not as “another L1 fighting for blockspace” but as an execution and abstraction layer. Instead of picking a chain, a network, a bridge and a wallet, NEAR Intents hides the plumbing: the user says what they want, and the system handles how.
Why Is NEAR Rising?
The catalysts have lined up one after another.
1. Confidential perps with Hyperliquid. In mid-September, NEAR enabled perpetual futures trading on near.com that is private by default. Hyperliquid provides the underlying engine — infrastructure that processed about $240 billion in volume over the past 30 days — while NEAR adds the privacy layer. A trader can open a position without the whole street seeing its size, direction and funding flow. For institutions and large traders, that is not cosmetics; it is a precondition for entry.
2. TVL and the rewards program. When Confidential Intents TVL passed $70 million, the @3.33 program switched on — a mechanism that rewards early adoption and accelerates the loop: more users, more volume, more rewards, more users again.
3. The Ondo Finance partnership. In late September, NEAR Intents enabled access to tokenized US products (around 20 instruments), connecting it to one of the year’s hottest narratives — real-world assets (RWA).
4. The AI story. NEAR’s 2026 roadmap revolves around three things: growing NEAR Intents into one of crypto’s largest trading venues, merging AI and Intents, and “user-owned AI” — intelligence owned by the user, not the corporation. In March, Brave Browser integrated Intents natively, opening access to more than 70 million users.
5. The technical breakout. Price escaped a multiyear downtrend, which also activated purely technical buyers who read charts, not roadmaps.
Invisible Crypto: AI Agents as the New Users
The most interesting part of the NEAR thesis is not the price, but the assumption about who will use blockchains five years from now. If the “invisible crypto” camp is right, it will not be humans signing transactions by hand, but AI agents trading, paying and moving value on a person’s behalf. The blockchain then becomes plumbing — something running in the background that nobody watches, like electricity or an internet protocol.
That is where Polosukhin’s line lands: “From co-authoring transformers to building the rails AI agents will actually use.” It sounds like marketing, but the logic holds. If agents execute billions of micro-transactions, the subnet must be cheap, fast — and confidential. The film Her showed what daily life with an AI companion looks like; NEAR is betting that companion will need a wallet.
Technical Analysis
The price at $4.91 sits near the daily high after a 17.3% move in 24 hours. On the daily chart, the token broke a multiyear trend channel and accelerated — the classic “breakout plus FOMO” pattern. Short-term momentum indicators are stretched and in overbought territory; moves like this rarely travel in a straight line, more often in jump-pause-jump cycles.
Key resistance is the psychological $5 level, then the $6 to $7 zone. On the downside, first support reads around $4.0 to $4.2 (where price consolidated before the breakout), with deeper support at $3.5. Despite the rally, the token is still 76% below its all-time high of $20.44 from January 2022 — both a lure for new buyers and a reminder of the pain of the last cycle. Daily volume of $1.56 billion confirms this is not a thin pump without liquidity.
Risks
Regulatory. Privacy and derivatives in the same sentence are a regulatory magnet. Any product that hides a trader’s identity quickly lands on the radar. The Tornado Cash outcome showed that “code as free speech” does not always hold up. Rules like those in the EU demand transfer visibility, and confidential perps do not fit neatly into that.
Token inflation. NEAR has no fixed maximum supply. Annual inflation runs around 5% (with a portion going to validators and tokenomics revised periodically), which dilutes holdings over time if the network does not grow fast enough.
Rewards as fuel. Part of the rally is incentive-driven, and “mercenary capital” is known for leaving as fast as it arrived. If the @3.33 program weakens or ends, some volume can evaporate.
Competition. Solana, Base, SUI and a whole lineup of AI and RWA projects are chasing the same money and the same narrative. NEAR is not alone in this race.
Volatility. A 150% move in a month means a 30% correction “in a day” is not impossible. Positions without stops end up as statistics.
Financial Data (NEAR)
- Price: $4.91
- 24h change: +17.2%
- 7d change: +34.5%
- 30d change: +153.4%
- Market cap: ~$6.42 billion (rank #22)
- 24h volume: ~$1.56 billion
- All-time high (ATH): $20.44 (January 2022), currently −76%
- All-time low (ATL): $0.53
- Circulating supply: ~1.31 billion NEAR (no fixed maximum, inflation ~5% per year)
- Consensus: Proof-of-Stake (Nightshade sharding)
Disclaimer: This content is informational and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile assets — every decision carries the risk of losing capital. Data sourced from CoinGecko and public sources on the publication date.