A mix of catalysts helped send the NEAR token as much as 31% higher over the past 24 hours.
While NEAR gave some gains in recent hours — trading around $2.23 as of 12:25 p.m. ET — the token remained up more than 20% on the day. So why is NEAR rallying even as bitcoin has slipped in recent days? Some crypto researchers point to a combination of institutional interest, AI-related narratives and upcoming technical upgrades.
One of the token's most high-profile endorsements recently came from prominent crypto investor Arthur Hayes, who described NEAR, HYPE and ZEC as "the holy trinity" of altcoins.
Vadim Zacodil, a former contributor to the protocol who appears to operate a NEAR staking pool, attempted to explain the price move in a social media post on Friday. While acknowledging Hayes may have helped drive retail interest, Zacodil argued several factors are contributing to NEAR’s rise.
Among them, Bitwise recently reported "significant inflows" into its NEAR exchange-traded product, according to Zacodil, potentially signaling growing institutional demand. The onchain analyst also pointed to the protocol’s buyback mechanisms and NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin’s artificial intelligence background as helping to spotlight the token.
Next month, NEAR is slated to roll out a major upgrade designed to expand network capacity as activity grows, improving scalability through dynamic resharding technology. The protocol has also increasingly positioned itself around privacy and confidential transactions — an area that Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly argued remains one of blockchain’s biggest unresolved challenges.
While NEAR has increasingly leaned into AI-focused messaging, at its core, the project remains a Layer 1 blockchain competing with networks like Ethereum and Solana, aiming to make decentralized applications faster and easier to use.
"NEAR trades around 56x annualised fees. That is cheaper than major L1 peers and much cheaper than LayerZero (ZRO) on a bridge-fee comparison," BitMEX Research Analyst Shang Wu said earlier this month. "Long NEAR if we see new AI features, growing fees and updated revenue capture mechanism keep confirming the story."
As of Friday afternoon, the token was up more than 50% over the past month, giving it a market capitalization of nearly $3 billion.