NEAR Protocol has delivered an exceptional 15% surge over the past 24 hours, climbing to approximately $2.8 and extending a month-long rally that has nearly doubled its price with a 90% gain over the past month. The token is now ranked number 30 by market cap and has outperformed the vast majority of the top 50 assets over the past seven days. The latest momentum is being fueled by NEAR Intents, the network's cross-chain transaction system that has processed over $19 billion in cumulative volume and generated approximately $32 million in fees, according to DefiLlama data. The system allows users to request desired outcomes such as swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana, with third-party solvers executing transactions behind the scenes. This cross-chain activity has drawn renewed attention to the protocol after months of limited price movement, with the 24-hour trading volume standing at approximately $689 million.
The renewed interest in NEAR is closely tied to a narrative from BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, who publicly named NEAR Protocol as part of his 'holy trinity of altcoins' alongside Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Zcash (ZEC) on May 22. As reported by MEXC, this endorsement triggered an immediate 30% spike on that day alone, pushing NEAR to a six-month high above $2.30. Hayes recently suggested there's 'a long way to go' in NEAR's rally, with the token gaining about 30% as traders rotated back into tokens tied to artificial intelligence and blockchain infrastructure earlier in the month. The endorsement has proven particularly prescient, as all three tokens have hit notable milestones simultaneously, with Hyperliquid posting an all-time high this month and privacy-focused Zcash rallying to multi-month highs. According to CoinGlass liquidation data, more than $9 million in short positions were liquidated during the move, demonstrating the strength of the retail response.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the hourly timeframe reads 53.31, sitting in neutral territory after pulling back from overbought levels above 70 seen earlier in the week around May 22 to May 23. This suggests the token has cooled off from the initial momentum spike without breaking down. Volume on the latest leg higher is relatively lower compared to the explosive volume seen during the May 22 to May 23 breakout, which briefly pushed 24-hour volume above $1 billion. The token is now fully circulated with a circulating supply of 1.3 billion NEAR out of a total supply of 1.3 billion, with the fully diluted valuation standing at $3.08 billion. NEAR remains well below its all-time high of $20.44 set in January 2022, with the current surge driven by a combination of high-profile endorsements, strong AI sector tailwinds from NVIDIA, and growing institutional positioning. The acceleration came as the total crypto market cap slipped about 0.42% to $2.58 trillion and roughly 78% of listed coins lost value on the day, suggesting NEAR's rally is a focused rotation rather than a rising tide.
NEAR's rally has been supported by significant AI-focused infrastructure developments and upcoming protocol upgrades. On May 20, NEAR Protocol announced that its most significant infrastructure upgrade since mainnet launch will go live in June 2026. The v2.13 upgrade introduces dynamic resharding, an automated scaling feature that allows the network to add or remove shards based on demand without requiring governance votes or manual validator coordination. This upgrade will also introduce post-quantum-safe signing using FIPS-204 (ML-DSA), making NEAR one of the first major blockchains to ship both automated scaling and quantum-resistant cryptography in a single release. Between May 20 and May 22, the NEAR team rolled out new AI privacy features that strip passwords and personal information from user prompts before they reach external AI models, tapping into both AI and data privacy narratives simultaneously. CoinMarketCap describes NEAR as 'a high performance, AI native platform built to power the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents' in its project overview.
The rally is not purely retail-driven, with institutional positioning showing significant growth. Bitwise, a crypto asset management firm, operates a European NEAR Staking ETP that has grown to approximately $40 million in assets under management, with Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley disclosing $7 million in inflows during the week of the initial breakout. On the ETF front, Grayscale filed to convert its NEAR Trust into a spot ETF under the ticker GSNR in January 2026, with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission decision expected around September 2026. A separate Bitwise spot NEAR ETF filing from May 2025 is also pending, with an approved ETF opening the door to regulated institutional capital flows. NEAR's positioning as 'the blockchain for AI' gives it direct relevance to the AI infrastructure narrative, with co-founder Illia Polosukhin co-authoring the foundational research behind modern transformer-based AI models. Current data from CoinCodex suggests models still see NEAR trading near $2.30 at year end 2026, only slightly below current levels, which implies the market is now trying to decide whether this latest burst is a new secular leg higher or just another sharp countertrend move.
