NEAR takes the lead: What is behind its nearly 80% rally

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NEAR takes the lead

NEAR pulls ahead

Today, NEAR is trading at around $4.3, after jumping by roughly 25% in just 24 hours. The project’s market capitalization has risen to about $5.6 billion, while daily trading volume has exceeded $2.4 billion.

For comparison, Bitcoin is holding above $81,000 with little growth, while most major altcoins have gained only 1–3%. Against that backdrop, NEAR clearly stands out.

According to CoinDesk, one of the main drivers has been rising activity in NEAR Intents, a service that allows users to swap tokens across different blockchains without manually moving funds through bridges. In recent days, Zcash trading volume routed through the service has surged. Major wallets, including ZODL and Vizor, have integrated Intents for ZEC swaps, while daily volume of such transactions increased roughly sixfold over the week.

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NEAR has seen strong momentum before. In May, the token gained as much as 31% in a single day and more than 50% over the month. At the time, the rally was linked to interest in AI, inflows into Bitwise’s NEAR investment product and expectations of technical upgrades to the network.

Traffic that started generating revenue

The sharp increase in ZEC activity showed that Intents is no longer being used as an experimental feature, but as working infrastructure for real transaction flow. By September, the service covered more than 30 blockchains and over 100 assets. By June, cumulative fees generated by Intents had exceeded $35.4 million, while the average daily figure remained above $125,000.

The next step was Confidential Intents, a version of the service designed for private transactions across different blockchains. It hides transaction details from outsiders and helps protect traders from others exploiting information about their trades or copying their strategies.

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By Sept. 17, funds locked in Confidential Intents had exceeded $70 million. After reaching that threshold, the project launched the first stage of its user incentive program and allocated 333,333 NEAR tokens to users who hold funds in the service and carry out swaps.

A return to AI

The development of Intents and private transactions is only part of a broader strategic shift. Over the past two years, the team has gradually been transforming NEAR from a conventional Layer 1 blockchain into infrastructure for autonomous AI agents that need payments, swaps and access to multiple blockchains.

This strategy looks especially logical given the background of NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin. Before creating NEAR, he worked at Google and was one of the eight authors of the 2017 research paper Attention Is All You Need. That work introduced the principle that underpins systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude today, Forbes writes.

In the same year, Polosukhin left Google and launched his own project together with Alexander Skidanov. The team initially experimented with automating software development before switching its focus to blockchain. That eventually became NEAR Protocol — a Layer 1 network designed to compete with Ethereum, Solana and other major platforms.

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The project went on to raise more than $533 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Dragonfly Capital. After the crypto market downturn of 2022–2023, the team returned to AI from a different angle: rather than building its own model, NEAR now offers an environment where AI agents can independently make payments, swap assets and operate across multiple networks.

A network built for new demand

The strategic shift has been accompanied by changes to the network itself. In the summer, NEAR launched dynamic resharding, a mechanism that automatically redistributes load across different segments of the blockchain as activity increases. This is designed to help the network handle more transactions without constantly expanding infrastructure manually.

At the same time, the team began changing the project’s tokenomics. One mechanism involves buying back NEAR using a portion of ecosystem revenue. The more fees services within the network generate, the more funds can potentially be directed toward token purchases on the market.

Institutional interest in the project has also started to grow. Bitwise reported notable inflows into its NEAR investment product, while Arthur Hayes named the token as one of his three most interesting altcoins alongside HYPE and ZEC.

Against this backdrop, NEAR is gradually becoming more than just another competitor to Ethereum and Solana. The project is trying to combine cross-chain liquidity, private transactions and infrastructure for AI agents within a single ecosystem.

Unlike many technological concepts in the crypto market, part of this strategy is already backed by real traffic and fee generation. That is why the current NEAR rally is linked not only to investor expectations, but also to the fact that the project’s new model is beginning to see practical use.

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