Author: Jae, PANews
On September 21, Bitcoin rose above $84,000, triggering a broad rally across the crypto market. Among the standout performers was NEAR, which has now surpassed $4.30, rising over 20% in the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, the total TVL on the Near network has risen to $256 million, reaching a new all-time high. Within just one week, two major product milestones—the launch of the Near protocol’s milestone incentive program and the introduction of privacy perpetual contracts—were realized, combined with heightened market sentiment in the privacy sector, collectively driving this rally.
TVL reaches an all-time high, driven by incentive mechanisms and privacy-focused derivatives.
The main drivers behind NEAR's outperformance are the two consecutive key developments it has successfully implemented.
Milestone snapshot triggered, incentivizing mechanism links TVL growth to token price.
The primary catalyst driving a rapid short-term influx of funds is the first snapshot of the "[email protected]" milestone incentive program.
On September 17, Near announced that the total TVL of its Confidential Intents protocol has surpassed the $70 million mark and is now nearing $98 million, with the official long-anticipated milestone incentive now activated.
According to the rules, the official will allocate 333,333 milestone tokens to addresses that maintain a privacy asset balance above $100 on near.com and have completed at least one cross-chain privacy swap, with a maximum allocation cap of 2% per wallet to prevent large holders from monopolizing liquidity.
The innovation of this mechanism lies in its market博弈 design: unlike traditional airdrop models where tokens are claimed and immediately sold, the milestone tokens users receive will initially be locked. Whether they can be exchanged on a 1:1 basis for tradable spot tokens depends on whether the 3-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of NEAR remains stably at or above $3.33.
In other words, for users to actually claim tradable airdrop rewards, they must align with the ecosystem, jointly drive TVL growth, and help maintain the token price at key levels. Fundamentally, "[email protected]" is similar to a call option with a strike price of $3.33.
In the short term, the effect of [email protected] has been quite significant. According to DeFiLlama data, since September 17, the net inflow of funds into the Near protocol has approached $65 million, entering a period of heightened capital inflow.
"Privacy by Default" derivatives launch, integrated with Hyperliquid liquidity
Milestone incentives are catalysts for short-term sentiment, while the launch of privacy perpetual contracts provides deeper structural support for this market rally.
On September 18, near.com officially launched its Confidential by Default derivatives trading feature, integrating the underlying clearing engine with Hyperliquid, the leading Perp DEX. This product directly addresses a long-standing pain point in on-chain derivatives trading: public order books expose the position sizes, entry points, and stop-loss strategies of whales and institutions on the public ledger, making them vulnerable to MEV attacks and front-running.
NEAR’s solution decouples transaction accounts from their position information on the underlying order book using a dedicated privacy shard and cross-chain bridging technology based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), shielding external observers from sensitive data such as fund sources and account details.
More importantly, NEAR did not spend vast resources to build liquidity from scratch; instead, it integrated with Hyperliquid’s deep order book, which handles over $240 billion in monthly trading volume, and over 50 major perpetual markets offering up to 40x leverage. Leveraging NEAR Intents’ multi-chain routing capabilities, traders can use assets distributed across different heterogeneous chains as initial margin, while the system automatically settles them as USDC margin in the background.
This model also reshapes Near’s revenue structure: the near.com frontend will continuously capture trading service fees through Hyperliquid’s Builder Code, transforming Near into a self-sustaining “cross-chain derivatives gateway.”
In fact, this is another application extension of NEAR’s “chain abstraction” roadmap: users do not need to interact with cross-chain bridges, different chain gas fees, or asset conversions—instead, they simply express their transaction intent through Intents, and the underlying infrastructure automatically handles cross-chain execution and settlement. According to official disclosures, the cumulative trading volume of NEAR Intents has reached $29.8 billion, spanning over 35 public blockchains.
Airdrop hunters + privacy rotation drive NEAR’s price upward
Amid the market frenzy, it is equally important to remain aware of risks and boundaries. This rally is supported not only by product execution but also by sentiment and speculation.
1. The risk of "羊毛党" leaving
Of the $70 million flowing into Confidential Intents, a significant portion may consist of speculative capital aimed at capturing milestone airdrops. Once the snapshot is completed, the VWAP conditions are met, and the tokens are unlocked, these arbitrageurs may quickly take profits, triggering a simultaneous decline in TVL and token price.
2. Limited scale of value capture
The NEAR official revenue dashboard shows that NEAR generated approximately $5.24 million in total revenue and about $1.82 million in net revenue over the past 30 days. Although a portion of the net revenue generated from Intents is used to repurchase NEAR tokens, token unlocks continue, and the gap between the repurchase rate and the inflation rate is still widening, limiting the offsetting effect of repurchases.
In addition, Near's current revenue accounts for less than 1% of its total market capitalization, which is insufficient to support sustained token price appreciation.
3. Rotation of Privacy Narrative Themes
NEAR's rise is also closely related to the privacy theme driven by ZEC.
Zcash’s on-chain wallet, Zodl, uses Near Intents to enable private ZEC exchanges, reducing friction. In this sense, Near serves as infrastructure for ZEC usage pathways. On the other hand, Grayscale’s research on ZEC has also noted that the “privacy” theme remains underpriced.
This creates a logical chain: ZEC rises → market re-evaluates the “privacy” theme → rotation among “privacy” assets → Near serves as Zcash’s infrastructure and aligns with the sentiment window → NEAR price increases.
If this assessment holds true, some of the recent funds flowing into NEAR may also belong to theme rotation capital.
However, NEAR’s Confidential Intents are merely a privacy transaction infrastructure, not a pure privacy coin. Once the privacy narrative cools and market risk appetite declines, some of the premium NEAR has recently gained may be retraced.
Additionally, the entire crypto market has been in an expansion phase over the past 30 days. In relative terms, Ethereum’s TVL has increased by over $5.7 billion, Solana’s TVL by over $900 million, and Base’s TVL by approximately $700 million. Although Near’s TVL growth rate of 63% far exceeds the other three, its absolute growth value of only $165 million remains significantly behind that of the major blockchains.
In short, Near's TVL growth has also benefited from the market-wide shift in risk appetite, rather than being an isolated event.
NEAR's recent surge is the result of three factors working together: innovative incentive mechanisms, product execution and delivery, and synchronized market sentiment in the sector.
The options-based airdrop aligns user incentives with ecosystem growth, avoiding the one-time selling pressure of traditional airdrops; privacy perpetual contracts leverage the underlying capabilities of chain abstraction to enter the high-value derivatives market, adopting a lightweight approach to "integrate with leading ecosystems."
However, sentiment and speculation also play a significant role in short-term price movements. Whether this rally becomes a short-term spike or a long-term turning point will depend on factors such as the flow of funds after token unlocks, whether product launches can further boost revenue, and how long the privacy theme can remain popular.