NEAR Jumps 11% in 24 Hours as Helius CEO Mumtaz Joins Foundation Council

NEAR Rallies Past $5.20 on Council Appointment

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) pushed higher through Friday morning, gaining more than 11% over the past 24 hours to trade above $5.20 as of 07:18 UTC. The NEAR price rally put the spotlight on a governance change from two days earlier: on October 14, the NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Foundation announced that Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz had joined its governing council. Market data on CoinGecko recorded the token at roughly $5.21, a market capitalization of $6.82 billion and daily trading volume near $1.24 billion, with the session range spanning $4.54 to $5.43 after selling pressure gave way to renewed buying. The move extended a 30-day advance of roughly 122%, though the token stayed below its October 11 high near $5.97, a level analysts mark as the key weekly resistance.

The appointment added an operator's voice to a council that already includes co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Mónica, former Foundation chief operating officer Chris Donovan and NEAR One founder Bowen Wang. The council oversees the Foundation and its major decisions, from ecosystem support to product strategy. Mumtaz stays on as chief executive of Helius, which builds infrastructure for Solana applications used by Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase and Bitwise. He had already been an early user of NEAR Protocol (NEAR) Intents, the system that lets users exchange assets across blockchains without handling each transfer manually, and has been a vocal supporter of privacy-focused infrastructure, particularly around Zcash. “For crypto to win, we need connected, unstoppable liquidity at planetary scale,” he said in the announcement, arguing that Solana, Zcash and Bitcoin should work through shared infrastructure. Polosukhin described him as an early Intents supporter whose technical experience would feed the Foundation's work on private assets and cross-chain markets.

Our composite support and resistance mapping places the strongest shelf under the market at $5.0026, scored 94 out of 100 from the confluence of the 20-day exponential moving average, the pivot point and the Ichimoku Tenkan. The first heavy ceiling sits at $5.8405, scored 87 out of 100, just below the $5.97 weekly resistance the analysts track. Positioning stayed constructive: the perpetual futures funding rate printed 0.0071% and open interest stood near $507 million, while the RSI read 56.44, leaving room before overbought territory. A daily close above $5.84 would clear the highest-scored barrier between the token and the $6 test.

Rekt Capital Flags $5.97 Weekly Rejection

Analyst Rekt Capital warned in an October 15 post that NEAR Protocol (NEAR) had not yet confirmed a breakout from its macro trading range. The token closed the week below the key resistance of $5.97 and then rejected, remaining inside the range, and had not even managed to hold $5.37 on the dip. In his read, NEAR needs to regain $5.37 and defend support near $4.90 to improve its technical position; failure would expose the descending trendline and, in a deeper correction, the range low at $3.79.

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The broader trend structure stayed intact. The daily chart kept the token above its four major exponential moving averages: the 20-day at $4.903, the 50-day at $4.052, the 100-day at $3.256 and the 200-day at $2.635. The MACD told a shorter-term story, with the line at 0.368 under its signal at 0.454 and the histogram at -0.086, a reading that shows the rally losing strength even as buyers held the higher timeframes. Analyst Giannis Andreou set the next major test at $6, with weekly support between $4.50 and $4.90. A recovery above $6 would strengthen the setup and bring $8.81 into view, and a confirmed breakout with a successful retest there would open a path toward $9.80–$10, with Fibonacci extensions near $10.91 and $13.57 and an optimistic case at $15.80, about 221% above the $4.928 price used in his analysis. A fall below $4.50 would weaken the structure behind that scenario. His longer-term roadmap extends to a $16 target for the token.

For the immediate range, NEAR must clear $5.50 before another attempt at $5.97–$6. The Foundation's latest figures put NEAR Intents past $33 billion in cumulative transaction volume, with confidential total value locked above $160 million, after an exploit that touched roughly $3.8 million in USDT on BNB Smart Chain forced a temporary halt before operations resumed on October 1. Institutional and large-holder interest has also followed the move: Bitwise's NEAR ETF NRR logged a $3.98M net inflow for Monday, October 12, and a $100 million whale redeployment has kept big-holder flows in view. NEAR last changed hands at $5.21, up 0.2% from the 07:18 UTC reading, with the uptrend behind the 122% 30-day climb still in place.