NEAR Protocol and its token surged sharply due to several factors: short liquidations, renewed interest in AI tokens, and increased commission revenue from its own cross-chain infrastructure.
Over the past seven days, NEAR has gained about 50% and climbed to $2.73.
The rally began after the token finally broke out of a prolonged sideways trend. For almost all of May, NEAR traded in a range from $1.20 to $1.75 with little movement.
When the breakout finally happened, a wave of short position liquidations quickly swept the market. According to analysts, traders lost more than $9.85 million on shorts, and the forced buyback of positions further fueled the price increase.
Amid the rally, the derivatives market also became very active. The volume of open positions first exceeded $473 million, and by May 24, the figure for NEAR futures had already risen above $720 million.
Currently, NEAR is trading around $2.75 with a market capitalization of about $3.57 billion. The daily trading volume exceeds $1 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
The NEAR token has risen more than 75% over the past week. Source: CoinMarketCap.
Arthur Hayes Includes NEAR in His ‘Holy Trinity’ of Altcoins
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes recently named NEAR, Hyperliquid (HYPE), and Zcash (ZEC) as the ‘holy trinity of altcoins’.
All three tokens have outperformed Bitcoin in recent weeks. HYPE hit a new all-time high, while ZEC rose to multi-month peaks.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin also discussed with Hayes how the privacy revolution is developing on the NEAR platform.
During their conversation, they touched on ZEC, HYPE and NEAR itself, linking the current rally to market interest in confidential computing and infrastructure for AI agents.
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Meanwhile, on the day of one of NEAR’s strongest surges, about 78% of tokens on the market, according to analysts, were actually losing value.
Why Did NEAR Start Rising at All?
In addition to the technical breakout, the market also found fundamental reasons for NEAR’s growth.
The first factor was the cross-chain Intents system within the NEAR ecosystem. According to on-chain analyst 0xNairolf and DefiLlama, in less than a year it has generated more than $33 million in fees.
The NEAR Intents system has already generated over $33 million in fees and processed more than $19 billion in volume. Source: DefiLlama.
The system processes swaps and cross-chain transfers between more than 35 blockchains. Since February 2026, settlement fees have started to be automatically directed to buy NEAR.
Analysts believe this has created a constant source of demand for the token.
Through NEAR Intents, more than $10 billion in total volume and over 15.7 million swaps have already been processed.
The second important growth factor was NEAR’s focus on AI, but with real products, not just marketing.
On May 20, NEAR introduced a system that removes passwords and personal data from requests before they reach Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini.
Developer Kent (@cuongdc_real) also announced on X that NEAR AI updated its model selection system and added support for Google Gemma 4 31B.
The model operates through a trusted execution environment within NEAR and uses end-to-end encryption.
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CoinMarketCap describes NEAR as a high-performance AI platform built for the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents.
Project co-founder Illia Polosukhin is also known as one of the co-authors of the 2017 research paper that first introduced the transformer architecture, which now underpins most modern large language models.
Risks Remain for Buyers at the Top
According to Token Terminal, the number of daily active users on the NEAR network has fallen from nearly 3 million at the start of 2026 to about 266,000.
Analysts see this as a potentially worrying sign, as the price rally is now far outpacing the network’s actual on-chain activity.
Meanwhile, NEAR is preparing another important update — dynamic resharding.
The new technology is designed to automatically scale the network during periods of sharp load increases.
If the update works as the project team expects, NEAR will not only be able to maintain its current growth momentum but also boost interest from AI developers and the corporate sector beyond the current market rally.
