cryptopolitan.com
The $NEAR Protocol and its token are riding on a wave powered by a mix of short liquidations, renewed interest in AI-linked tokens, and growing fee revenue from its cross-chain settlement system, which has helped it to gain roughly 50% over the past seven days, trading near $2.73.
The rally started when the token finally broke out of a month-long lull where $NEAR’s price traded within a tight range between $1.20 and $1.75 for most of May.
The rally, when it finally arrived, caused liquidations of over $9.85 million in short positions and forced buybacks that drove upward pressure.
Derivatives activity rose alongside the spot move, and open interest went up above $473 million. As of May 24, $NEAR futures open interest had crossed $720 million.
$NEAR is currently trading around $2.75 with a market capitalization of $3.57 billion and 24-hour volume above $1 billion as seen on CoinMarketCap.
Arthur Hayes names $NEAR in ‘holy trinity’ trade
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes recently called $NEAR, Hyperliquid ($HYPE), and Zcash ($ZEC) “the holy trinity of altcoins.”
All three tokens listed by Hayes have performed better than Bitcoin (BTC) lately, with $HYPE reaching an all-time high and $ZEC logging multi-month peaks, as Cryptopolitan reported.
$NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin joined Hayes to discuss “how the privacy revolution runs on $NEAR.” They touched on $ZEC, $HYPE, and $NEAR itself while linking the latest rally to the thesis around confidential computation and AI agent infrastructure.
Around 78% of listed tokens reportedly lost value on the day $NEAR posted one of its largest single-session gains.
Why is $NEAR rallying?
Apart from the technical setup, two protocol-level developments gave traders a fundamental basis for the $NEAR trade.
First, $NEAR’s Intents cross-chain settlement system has generated more than $33 million in fees in under a year, according to on-chain analyst @0xNairolf and Defillama on X.
$NEAR Intents have generated over $33M in fees since launch.
Track detailed usage on our comprehensive $NEAR dashboard. https://t.co/KIwqZlXoaj pic.twitter.com/CmUeymJ7BT
— DefiLlama.com (@DefiLlama) May 25, 2026
The system processes swaps and bridge transactions across more than 35 blockchains, with settlement fees moving through programmatic $NEAR purchases since February 2026. Analysts say it has created “a continuous demand floor.” $NEAR Intents has handled over $10 billion in cumulative volume across more than 15.7 million swaps.
The second development that has turned the tide for $NEAR is its leaning into AI branding with tangible product releases.
A May 20 rollout by $NEAR strips passwords and personally identifiable information from prompts before they reach large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Developer Kent with the X username, @cuongdc_real, stated on X that $NEAR AI updated its model picker to include Google’s Gemma 4 31B, running on $NEAR’s trusted execution environment infrastructure with end-to-end encryption.
CoinMarketCap describes $NEAR as “a high-performance, AI-native platform built to power the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents.” Its co-founder, Polosukhin, previously co-authored a 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture, which is being used in today’s large language models.
Risks remain for late buyers
The daily active users on the $NEAR network went down from nearly 3 million earlier in 2026 to roughly 266,000, according to Token Terminal data. Analysts see this as a potential warning sign, having observed the gap between price action and on-chain usage.
Dynamic resharding is an upcoming protocol upgrade coming soon, and it is designed to enable automatic scaling whenever there is a spike in demand. The execution may help the protocol to sustain its momentum and make its case to enterprise and AI developers beyond this week’s move.