Behind NEAR's Doubling: 3 Major Trends Becoming the Engine of Coin Prices

Written by: Maher, Foresight News

On May 25, the current price of the public chain NEAR token is $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.5, with its market capitalization returning above $3 billion. Amidst the fluctuations of mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin, NEAR has shown independent performance, becoming one of the most outstanding tokens besides ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What is the reason behind its explosion?

AI Narrative

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is already a veteran in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, with other authors including Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer, all from Google Brain / Google Research. This paper proposed the Transformer architecture, which is entirely based on the attention mechanism, greatly enhancing parallel training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of all mainstream large model frameworks today, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

From the early days, NEAR has regarded AI as a core strategy. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super application, integrating cross-chain exchange, privacy tools, and smart contract management, with built-in AI capabilities to support autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia was also officially appointed as the CEO of NEAR Foundation, focusing primarily on the AI core narrative.

In May, Nvidia's earnings report boosted the overall AI sector, and NEAR was seen as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside TAO.

On May 22, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes included NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC in his article, directly igniting market sentiment.

Privacy Public Chain

The blockchain has long faced the privacy dilemma of "transparency equals public." The explosive growth of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR has caused the industry to refocus on the privacy track, with various protocols, including public chains, beginning to add privacy features to their protocols.

NEAR was founded in 2018, with its initial core positioning not being AI, but scalability. Its earliest advancements were primarily centered around sharding technology, continuously optimizing, and it was one of the popular public chains at the time touted as the "Ethereum killer."

Because of this, NEAR's public offering on CoinList once caused the latter's website to crash. During the bull market cycle from 2020 to 2021, NEAR surged from $0.5 to a peak of $20.59, becoming one of the most notable star tokens of that year.

However, fast forward to the current cycle, the vast majority of old coins and new VC coins have been spurned by the market. Therefore, even in this bull market cycle, NEAR only reached a high of $9 in 2024, and then it declined all the way, with its price dropping to a low of $0.84 in 2026.

After the official launch of NEAR Intents, the demand for privacy began to become very important. Intents are the core of cross-chain transactions, allowing users to express their intentions for execution. However, large transactions on public chains are susceptible to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attacks, which pose significant obstacles for institutions, large holders, and ordinary DeFi users alike.

The NEAR team began planning privacy as an important supplement to Intents. In late May of this year, the NEAR Intents team launched the Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents features, supporting private cross-chain transfers of assets like ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across more than 35 chains. The sender, amount, and path are all hidden, with results displayed only on the target chain, utilizing private sharding + TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridging.

NEAR also opened a privacy mode, where user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are defaulted to private, ensuring that whether for ordinary users, enterprise users, or AI agents executing complex strategies, data leakage does not occur. The concurrently launched Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) further supports privacy multi-signatures, payrolls, and cross-chain payments, having processed a total of $68 million in confidential transactions.

Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR's balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain functionality is more practical, directly addressing enterprise-level needs and driving a rebound in TVL and developer activity.

NEAR Intents Fee Buyback

In October 2025, NEAR completed the final batch of initial supply unlocks, with a circulation rate approaching 100%.

NEAR has designed a dual mechanism of inflation + burning since the early days of its mainnet: a maximum of 5% inflation per year (which has been permanently halved to 2.5% as of October 2025), with 90% allocated as rewards for validators and 10% going to the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no large unlocks or linear unlock events remaining, only daily epoch reward emissions (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released in the last 30 days, accounting for 0.4% of total supply).

In addition, the revenue from NEAR Intents fees will be directly used to buy back NEAR tokens in the market, bringing significant buying pressure.

The intents on the NEAR protocol drive the cross-chain transaction layer, where users only need to express the desired outcome (for example, exchanging BTC for SOL), and the best execution path will be provided, supporting multiple chains without the need for bridging/wrapping assets and with low fees.

Previously, NEAR Intents had two parts of fees: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators), but now all protocol fees go towards buybacks. The repurchased NEAR tokens are not necessarily burned immediately; instead, they may be staked, locked, or have liquidity removed, but they still count towards total supply, reducing circulation pressure while also earning staking rewards.

According to the latest data from defiLlama, the TVL of NEAR Intents has exceeded $80 million, with daily fees fluctuating around $100,000, meaning a monthly buyback amount of about $3 million.

By the end of this month, its core development team Near One will also announce the latest technical progress, with the team set to release dynamic redistribution by the end of the second quarter of 2026, significantly enhancing scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme and upgrade it in June this year to enhance its resistance to quantum computing.

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