NEAR Jumps 14% After Sunrise Integration Opens Solana Trading

Near Intents Routes Cross-Chain Liquidity

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) has entered the Solana (SOL) ecosystem through Sunrise, an arrangement the two projects announced on Thursday, October 15. From that day, the NEAR token became tradable directly from Solana wallets and decentralized exchanges, giving holders a second major venue network for the asset. The NEAR price answered within a day, gaining roughly 14% over 24 hours to trade between $5.24 and $5.30. The plumbing behind the move is Near Intents, the protocol's cross-chain asset-routing technology: it links assets held on multiple blockchains, while Sunrise builds the liquidity markets on Solana where those assets change hands. Traders reach NEAR liquidity through Jupiter and Raydium, the Solana-native platforms, alongside wallets and trading aggregators across the network. For NEAR, a Layer 1 blockchain protocol, the deal extends distribution well beyond its own chain and moves cross-chain interoperability from background infrastructure to a liquidity service in its own right. Both sides confirmed they plan to widen the roster of supported assets beyond NEAR Protocol (NEAR) itself. A later phase would embed Near Intents directly into Sunrise, so users can move assets from several blockchains into Solana without routing through a separate bridge protocol. Neither party has published commercial terms, an incentive structure or a go-live date for that deeper integration. What is confirmed is the split of labor: Sunrise supplies the markets, Near Intents supplies the routing. The announcement arrived into an already firm tape, with the token having more than doubled across the past 30 days, and the new venue gives that strength a concrete outlet in Solana trading volume.

Mumtaz Joins the Foundation Board

The integration lands alongside a governance change at the NEAR Foundation. Mert Mumtaz, chief executive of Solana infrastructure firm Helius, has joined the foundation's board of directors, where he supports product strategy, market entry and ecosystem development. The board already seats NEAR Protocol (NEAR) co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Monica, pairing the protocol's own founder with operators from the Solana infrastructure and digital custody worlds. Mumtaz framed the appointment in explicitly cross-chain terms: “Digital assets, to succeed, need to be connected at global scale with uninterrupted liquidity,” he said. “Solana, Zcash and Bitcoin cannot each succeed alone. They need to work together, and NEAR is the connective medium.” The market backdrop reinforces the timing. NEAR has roughly doubled in price over the last 30 days, a stretch that also included the launch of Bitwise's NEAR ETF, adding a fund wrapper to the token's market. The board news itself moved the tape: the token was up about 11% in 24 hours when we covered the appointment and NEAR jumped on the council news earlier in the session, and the gain stretched to roughly 14% by early Friday as the Solana (SOL) integration details spread. Solana's decentralized exchange venues are among the busiest retail trading environments in the sector, and NEAR now sits inside them rather than alongside them. Helius builds infrastructure for Solana, so the appointment ties NEAR's governance directly to a firm rooted in the network it is bridging toward.

The Undisclosed Half of the Deal

The Sunrise arrangement reads as a distribution deal rather than a technology launch: Near Intents already routes assets between chains, and what is new is a dedicated set of Solana liquidity markets plus, eventually, native placement inside Sunrise itself. What the announcement leaves out matters as much as what it states: neither side has disclosed how liquidity providers are compensated, which assets follow NEAR, or when the direct integration goes live. Those gaps set the terms of the next news cycle. With the token up about 14% in 24 hours after doubling across 30 days, our NEAR technical analysis tracks whether the $5.24-$5.30 band holds, and the Giannis Andreou's $16 target, set off the weekly breakout, now has a fresh catalyst to test against.