NEAR's native token has surged nearly 30% to $2.24, making it the best-performing cryptocurrency among the top 100 coins by market cap over the past 24 hours. According to reports from CoinDesk, the token gained more than 27% in the last 24 hours to trade at $2.25, significantly outperforming major cryptocurrencies. The rally has been accompanied by a 60% gain over the past month, reflecting strong investor confidence in the protocol's scaling capabilities and AI-focused positioning. The surge coincides with a broader capital rotation after months where Bitcoin absorbed most of available liquidity, with Sammi Li, CEO of exchange Ju.com, describing NEAR as "one of the most obvious beneficiaries" of this flow.
According to the protocol's announcement, Illia Polosukhin announced the arrival of dynamic resharding as part of upgrade 2.13, scheduled for June 2026. The mechanism allows shards to split automatically upon reaching a certain state size, which would enable scaling to more than 70 shards with throughput exceeding that of Visa. As reported by CoinDesk, shards are smaller, independent partitions of the blockchain network that process transactions and smart contracts in parallel, helping Near handle more traffic than typical blockchains with a single checkout line. The current manual process requires weeks of validator coordination, a vote, and a staged rollout, but the upcoming dynamic resharding will automate this process by splitting when a shard hits a state size threshold and adding more independent parallel validators.
The protocol has introduced confidential on-chain treasuries through Trezu, a private on-chain financial management product that includes multisig, payroll, balance administration, and cross-chain payments across more than 35 networks. According to the protocol's official account, $68 million moved confidentially through near.com over the past month using this infrastructure. Additionally, NEAR AI implemented automatic anonymization of personal information in prompts sent to closed models such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, ensuring that sensitive data does not leave the user's device. These enhancements position NEAR as a natural destination for AI-driven applications and privacy-conscious users.
Despite the explosive moves in specific assets, users on prediction platform Myriad assign only a 12% probability to an altseason beginning before July 2026, a figure that remained unchanged throughout May. Sammi Li warned that prices can move "much faster than fundamentals" once momentum takes hold, describing part of the rally as narrative-driven. However, he considered the persistent caution to be constructive, arguing that capital will remain concentrated in projects with real ecosystems in a market "far more selective than previous cycles." The protocol's longstanding positioning around artificial intelligence makes it well-positioned for continued growth as the market seeks exposure to AI-driven applications.
