Author: Ma He, Foresight News
On May 25, the price of the NEAR blockchain token stood at $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.5, with its market cap returning to over $3 billion. While mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin experienced volatility, NEAR charted an independent course, emerging as one of the most outstanding performers alongside tokens like ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What exactly are the reasons behind its explosive growth?
The AI Narrative
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a seasoned figure in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the seminal Transformer paper, alongside others including Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer, who were from Google Brain / Google Research. This paper introduced the Transformer architecture, which relies entirely on attention mechanisms, greatly enhancing parallel training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of today's mainstream large model frameworks like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
NEAR has made AI a core strategy from its early days. In February this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super-app, integrating cross-chain swaps, privacy tools, and smart contract management into one platform, with built-in AI capabilities supporting autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia officially assumed the role of CEO of the NEAR Foundation, primarily focusing on the core AI narrative.
In May, Nvidia's earnings report spurred a resurgence in the overall AI sector, with NEAR being viewed as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside projects like TAO.
On May 22, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, in an article, listed NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC, directly igniting market sentiment.
Privacy-Focused Blockchain
Blockchain 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 sector, prompting various protocols, including public chains, to integrate privacy features.
Founded in 2018, NEAR's initial core positioning was not AI, but scalability. Its earliest progress also centered on continuously optimizing sharding technology, positioning itself as one of the hot "Ethereum killer" public chains of that time.
Because of this, NEAR's public sale on CoinList once crashed the platform's website. During the 2020-2021 bull cycle, NEAR skyrocketed from $0.5 to a peak 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 shunned by the market. Therefore, even in this bull cycle, NEAR only peaked at $9 in 2024 before declining steadily, hitting a low of $0.84 in 2026.
After the official launch of NEAR Intents, privacy demand became crucial. Intents are core to cross-chain transactions, allowing users to express their intent for execution. However, public on-chain large transactions are vulnerable to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attacks, a significant drawback for institutions, large holders, and ordinary DeFi users alike.
The NEAR team began planning privacy as a key complement to Intents. In late May this year, the NEAR Intents team launched 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, utilizing private sharding and TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridging.
NEAR also opened a privacy mode, where user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are privatized by default. This ensures data doesn't leak, whether for ordinary users, enterprise users, or AI agents executing complex strategies. Concurrently launched Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) further support private multi-sig, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having cumulatively processed $68 million in confidential transactions.
Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR strikes a more practical balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain capabilities, directly targeting enterprise-level demand and driving a recovery in TVL and developer activity.
NEAR Intents Fee Buyback
In October 2025, NEAR completed the unlocking of the final batch of its initial supply, achieving nearly 100% circulation.
NEAR implemented a dual mechanism of inflation and burning from its mainnet's early days: a maximum annual inflation of 5% (permanently halved to 2.5% via an upgrade in October 2025), with 90% allocated as rewards to validators and 10% going to the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no more major or linear unlock events, only regular epoch reward emissions (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released in the last 30 days, about 0.4% of total supply).
Additionally, the fee revenue generated by NEAR Intents is directly used to buy back NEAR tokens in the market, providing significant buying pressure.
The Intent-driven cross-chain transaction layer on the NEAR protocol allows users to simply express their desired outcome (e.g., swap BTC for SOL), and it provides the optimal execution path, supporting multiple chains, no bridging/wrapped assets, and low fees.
NEAR Intents previously had two fee components: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators), but protocol fees now all go through the buyback path. The repurchased NEAR is not necessarily burned immediately; instead, it can be staked, locked, or removed from liquidity after repurchase. While still counted in total supply, this reduces circulating supply pressure and can also generate staking rewards.
According to the latest data from defiLlama, NEAR Intents' TVL has exceeded $80 million, generating daily fees fluctuating around $100,000, translating to a monthly buyback amount near $3 million.
At the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, also announced the latest technical progress. By the end of Q2 2026, the team will release dynamic re-sharding, significantly improving scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce and upgrade NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme in June this year, enhancing its resistance to quantum computing.
