On May 25th, the price of the public blockchain NEAR's token stands at $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.5, with its market capitalization reclaiming a position above $3 billion.
While mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin are fluctuating, NEAR has charted an independent course, standing out as one of the best-performing tokens alongside others like ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What is the underlying reason for this breakout?
AI Narrative
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a veteran in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, which includes other authors like Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer, all from Google Brain/Google Research.
This paper proposed the Transformer architecture, which relies entirely on the attention mechanism, greatly improving parallel training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of the framework for all mainstream large language models today, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
NEAR has made AI a core strategy from the early days. In February this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super app, integrating cross-chain swapping, privacy tools, and smart contract management into one platform with built-in AI capabilities, supporting autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia also officially assumed the role of CEO at the NEAR Foundation, focusing primarily on the core AI narrative.
In May, Nvidia's earnings report spurred a general recovery in the AI sector. NEAR is seen as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside others like TAO.
On May 22nd, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes mentioned NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC in an article, directly igniting market sentiment.
Privacy-Focused Public Chain
The blockchain industry has long faced the privacy dilemma of "transparency equals publicity." The surge of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR has refocused industry attention on the privacy track, with various protocols, including public chains, beginning to add privacy features.
NEAR was founded in 2018. Its initial core positioning was not AI, but scalability. Its earliest developments also focused on continuously optimizing sharding technology, making it one of the popular "Ethereum killer" public chains at the time.
Because of this, NEAR's public sale on CoinList once caused the latter's website to crash. During the 2020-2021 bull market cycle, NEAR surged from $0.5 to a high of $20.59, becoming one of the most eye-catching star tokens of that era.
However, fast-forwarding to the current cycle, the vast majority of older tokens and new VC tokens have been largely abandoned by the market. Therefore, even in this bull cycle, NEAR only briefly reached a high of $9 in 2024 before declining, hitting a low of $0.84 in 2026.
After the official launch of NEAR Intents, privacy needs began to become very important. Intents are the core of cross-chain transactions, where users express their intent for execution. However, publicly conducting large transactions on-chain is vulnerable to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attacks. This drawback poses a significant obstacle for institutions, large holders, and ordinary DeFi users alike.
The NEAR team began planning privacy as an important complement to Intents. In late May this year, the NEAR Intents team launched the Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents features, supporting private cross-chain transfers of assets like ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across 35+ chains. The sender, amount, and path are all hidden, with only the result displayed on the target chain. The underlying technology uses a private shard + TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridge.
NEAR also opened a privacy mode, where user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are private by default. This prevents data leaks for ordinary users, enterprise users, and AI agents executing complex strategies. The Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) launched during the same period further supports private multi-signature, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having already processed $68 million in confidential transactions cumulatively.
Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR's balance between privacy and usability, as well as cross-chain functionality, is more practical. It also directly targets enterprise-level demands, driving a recovery in TVL and developer activity.
NEAR Intents Fee Buyback
In October 2025, NEAR completed the final batch of its initial supply unlock, with the circulation rate approaching 100%.
NEAR designed a dual mechanism of inflation + burning from the early days of its mainnet: a maximum annual inflation of 5% (permanently halved to 2.5% via an upgrade in October 2025), with 90% going to validators as rewards and 10% entering the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no major unlocks or linear unlock events, only regular epoch reward emissions (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released in the last 30 days, accounting for 0.4% of the total supply).
In addition, the fee revenue generated by NEAR Intents is used to directly buy back NEAR tokens on the market, also providing significant buying pressure.
NEAR's intent-driven cross-chain transaction layer on its protocol allows users to simply express the desired outcome (e.g., swapping BTC for SOL), and the system provides the optimal execution path, supporting multi-chain transactions without the need for bridging/wrapped assets and with low fees.
NEAR Intents previously had two fee components: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators). However, protocol fees now entirely go towards the buyback path. The repurchased NEAR is not necessarily burned immediately but is instead staked, locked, or removed from liquidity. It still counts towards the total supply, reducing circulating supply pressure while also earning staking rewards.
According to the latest data from defiLlama, the TVL of NEAR Intents has exceeded $80 million. Its daily generated fees fluctuate around $100,000, meaning the monthly buyback amount is approximately $3 million.
At the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, also announced the latest technological progress. The team will release dynamic resharding by the end of Q2 2026, significantly improving scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme and related upgrades in June this year to enhance its resistance to quantum computing.
