NEAR Protocol’s token continued its strong upward trajectory, rising 15% in the past 24 hours to around $2.8 and capping a month-long rally that has seen its price double.
The surge has been largely fueled by increasing adoption of NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain execution system. This feature allows users to define an intended outcome—such as swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana—while third-party solvers carry out the transaction seamlessly in the background.
Data from DefiLlama indicates that NEAR Intents has processed over $19 billion in cumulative volume and generated approximately $32 million in fees, drawing renewed market attention after an extended period of muted price performance.
Sentiment received an additional boost after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes referred to NEAR, Hyperliquid’s HYPE, and ZEC as crypto’s “holy trinity” in a social media post, suggesting the rally may still have significant upside.
Earlier gains were also supported by a rotation back into tokens tied to artificial intelligence and blockchain infrastructure, with NEAR climbing about 30% at the start of the month. Institutional interest has been picking up as well, highlighted by the Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP in Europe reaching roughly $40 million in assets under management, including $7 million in inflows over a single week.
Looking ahead, investors are closely monitoring a planned network upgrade in June that will introduce dynamic resharding. The upgrade aims to enhance scalability by automatically splitting network shards as demand grows, improving performance during periods of heavy usage.
Despite the recent rally, NEAR remains far below its 2022 peak of nearly $20.
NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain designed for decentralized applications, artificial intelligence use cases, and cross-chain interactions. It operates on a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and leverages sharding to handle high transaction volumes while simplifying the user experience across blockchain networks.
