Bitwise Report Sends NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Toward $5.53 Resistance

The Bitwise Case Behind an 8% Day

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) has delivered one of the sharpest single-session advances among major tokens this week. The NEAR price climbed more than 8% within a day, and the quote now sits at $5.33, up 7.1% over 24 hours and roughly 0.4% above its level when coverage of the move was filed at 03:10 UTC on Thursday. The rally has a primary document behind it: a report from asset manager Bitwise, whose chief investment officer Matt Hougan laid out the case that NEAR Intents, the protocol's cross-chain execution and settlement layer, has outgrown its technical roadmap and is producing measurable fundamentals. Intents is described there as a business line rather than a promise: a fee-generating rail that AI agents and cross-chain traders already use. By that count, cumulative volume routed through Intents has passed $30 billion, volume once scattered across every separate bridge protocol, and annualized fees are estimated near $45 million, part of which is recycled into NEAR Protocol (NEAR) token buybacks. Hougan framed the fee-and-buyback loop as the network's core growth engine, arguing each dollar of agent activity feeds demand for the token directly. The report ties the setup to NEAR's position at the junction of the artificial intelligence narrative and cross-chain financial infrastructure, a combination it says carries explosive upside if AI agent activity keeps compounding. The market has priced the same view in compressed form. On-chain transaction volumes have surged alongside the re-rating, and institutional attention has settled on the protocol because its model, in which a user states a task in natural language and an agent executes it with settlement on-chain, already generates revenue. The advance also stands out for its timing. It arrived during a stretch in which much of the altcoin field drifted lower, which is why desks reading the week have called it a differentiated move built on NEAR's own ecosystem rather than a beta rally borrowed from the wider market.

Positioning around the move reads cleanly. Our composite support and resistance scoring puts the nearest strong overhead marker at $5.53, where converging indicators score 87 out of 100, and the nearest strong floor at $5.21, scored 83 out of 100. The quote sits inside that band nearer its upper edge, with the relative strength index at 66.84 and the trend read as an uptrend. Derivatives positioning is constructive rather than stretched: funding on perpetual futures runs at 0.0056%, and open interest stands at $609.97 million. A daily close above $5.53 would hand the tape to the moderate line above it; losing $5.21 would reopen the floor shelf below. The fuller breakdown sits in our NEAR technical analysis.

ETF Rails and the Polosukhin Lineage

Much of the market's confidence traces to the people and products around the NEAR Protocol ecosystem. The network was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need”, the work that underpins the transformer models behind today's AI boom. That lineage is why NEAR Protocol (NEAR) is pitched as more than another layer 1: it aims to be the infrastructure connecting AI agents to blockchains, where an agent receives a task in natural language, executes it, and settles the result through on-chain smart contracts. Bitwise has already acted on the thesis. Its NEAR ETF debuted on NYSE Arca with a 5% staking yield, and integration with a large fintech platform through the Robinhood Crypto chain has widened retail access sharply. The two rails reach different audiences: the ETF wrapper for allocated capital, the wallet integration for self-directed traders. The report adds that the intent infrastructure has just completed a stability review and is running at full capacity, the point at which buy-side pressure stepped up steeply. Analysts covering the week argue NEAR is carving out a differentiated price path through the broader correction, on the strength of its technical ecosystem and fundamentals. Their medium-term case runs through its fee-based tokenomics: if the buyback and burn mechanics keep converting AI agent market share into token demand, a revaluation of the protocol's business value accelerates. Polosukhin has been explicit about the ambition in our earlier coverage, arguing that NEAR may cut centralized exchanges out of many trades. The token enters that debate with its own record, having near-tripled from $1.80 in September before this week's push. Whether NEAR lands as the core payment network for the AI agent economy, and whether Intents' cumulative volume keeps compounding, sets the pace of any further rally. The quote last read $5.33, roughly 4% beneath the nearest strong overhead edge.