On May 25, the native token of the public blockchain NEAR was trading at $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has risen from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.50, with its market capitalization surpassing $3 billion again.
As major crypto assets like Bitcoin fluctuate, NEAR has emerged with an independent rally, becoming one of the top-performing tokens alongside ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What is the reason behind its surge?
AI Narrative
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a seasoned expert in AI; he is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, alongside other authors such as Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer, all from Google Brain/Google Research.
This paper introduces the Transformer architecture, which relies entirely on attention mechanisms, significantly improving parallel training efficiency and model scale. It is the origin of today's mainstream large model frameworks, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
NEAR has prioritized AI as a core strategy since its early days. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super app, integrating cross-chain swapping, privacy tools, and smart contract management with built-in AI capabilities to support autonomous agent use cases. In November 2023, Illia officially assumed the role of CEO at the NEAR Foundation, with a primary focus on the AI-centric narrative.
In May, NVIDIA's earnings report spurred a broad recovery in the AI sector, with NEAR regarded as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside projects like TAO.
On May 22, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, listed NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC in an article, directly igniting market sentiment.
Privacy blockchain
The blockchain has long faced a privacy dilemma: "transparency equals exposure." The surge in prices of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR has prompted the industry to refocus on privacy solutions, with protocols—including public blockchains—beginning to integrate privacy features into their designs.
Founded in 2018, NEAR's original core focus was not AI, but scalability. Its earliest advancements centered on continuous optimization of sharding technology, making it one of the popular blockchains dubbed "Ethereum killers" at the time.
Because of this, NEAR’s public sale on CoinList temporarily took down the platform’s website. During the 2020–2021 bull market cycle, NEAR surged from $0.50 to a peak of $20.59, becoming one of the most prominent tokens of the year.
However, as we fast-forward to this cycle, the majority of legacy coins and new VC-backed tokens have been rejected by the market. As a result, even during this bull cycle, NEAR only reached a high of $9 in 2024 before steadily declining, with its price dropping as low as $0.84 in 2026.
After NEAR Intents officially launched, privacy needs became critically important. Intents are at the core of cross-chain transactions, allowing users to express their intent for execution, but large on-chain transactions are vulnerable to MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks—a significant drawback for institutions, large holders, and everyday DeFi users alike.
The NEAR team began planning privacy as a key enhancement to Intents. In late May of this year, the NEAR Intents team launched Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents, enabling private cross-chain transfers of assets such as ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across 35+ chains. The sender, amount, and route are fully concealed, with only the final result visible on the target chain, powered by a private sharding + TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridge.
NEAR also enables privacy mode by default, ensuring that user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are automatically private—preventing data leaks for individual users, enterprise users, and AI agents executing complex strategies. Concurrently launched, Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) further support private multi-sig, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having processed a cumulative total of $68 million in confidential transactions.
Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR offers a more practical balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain interoperability, directly addressing enterprise needs and driving a recovery in TVL and developer activity.
NEAR Intents Fee Buyback
In October 2025, NEAR completed the final batch of initial supply unlocks, bringing the circulating supply close to 100%.
NEAR was designed from the early days of the mainnet with a dual mechanism of inflation and burning: a maximum annual inflation rate of 5% (permanently halved to 2.5% via an upgrade in October 2025), with 90% allocated as rewards to validators and 10% directed to the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no major or linear unlocking events remaining, with only daily epoch rewards being emitted (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released over the past 30 days, accounting for 0.4% of the total supply).
In addition, NEAR Intents fee revenue is used to directly repurchase NEAR tokens on the market, generating significant buying pressure.
An intent-driven cross-chain trading layer on the NEAR protocol allows users to simply express their desired outcome—such as swapping BTC for SOL—and automatically provides the optimal execution path, supporting multiple chains without the need for bridges or wrapped assets, at low fees.
Previously, NEAR Intents had two fees: a protocol fee and a distribution fee (shared with third-party integrators). However, the protocol fee now fully follows a buyback pathway. The NEAR tokens repurchased are not necessarily burned immediately; instead, they are staked, locked, or removed from liquidity pools, but still counted toward the total supply. This reduces pressure on the circulating supply while generating staking rewards.
According to the latest data from DefiLlama, NEAR Intents has a TVL exceeding $80 million, with daily fees fluctuating around $100,000, resulting in monthly buybacks of approximately $3 million.
By the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, will announce the latest technical advancements: by the end of the second quarter of 2026, the team will launch dynamic sharding to significantly enhance scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce and upgrade NEAR’s post-quantum secure signature scheme this June to strengthen its resistance to quantum computing.