NEAR Protocol has seen a remarkable 28% increase in its token price over the past 24 hours, marking a 45% rise for the week. This upswing follows three important protocol upgrades that enhance privacy and scalability, positioning NEAR as a significant player in the altcoin market.
The latest enhancements, implemented between May 20 and May 22, include confidential on-chain treasuries, AI prompt privacy, and automatic network scaling. These developments have established NEAR as a potential settlement layer for AI agents and confidential finance solutions, a move that has strongly resonated with investors.
NEAR’s performance surpasses other altcoins such as Worldcoin and Venice Token, which experienced increases of 12% and 8%, respectively. This price shift comes despite a recent pullback in Bitcoin, which dropped from nearly $82,000 to around $77,000. Sammi Li, CEO of crypto exchange Ju.com, notes that NEAR has become a primary beneficiary of capital rotation, as liquidity that was once concentrated in Bitcoin begins to flow into large-cap altcoins.
The driving force behind NEAR's rally is a concentrated push across its product offerings. The launch of Confidential Treasuries enables private on-chain multisig, payroll management, and cross-chain payments across more than 35 blockchains. This feature utilizes NEAR’s private sharding and Intents infrastructure, with the protocol reporting that $68 million was moved confidentially out of near.com in the last month. Additionally, NEAR AI has introduced automatic personal identifiable information (PII) anonymization for prompts sent to closed models such as Claude and ChatGPT. This functionality ensures that sensitive data remains on the user's machine, addressing significant enterprise concerns about data leakage and inference costs.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, has actively promoted these upgrades, framing them as essential to what he describes as the forthcoming "agentic market," where specialized AI agents compete based on outcomes tied to user intents. He mentioned that the upcoming dynamic resharding feature will allow NEAR to scale to over 70 shards, potentially offering a transaction throughput greater than that of Visa. This scalability is crucial as the number of AI agents transacting on-chain is expected to grow.
Despite NEAR's recent success, market sentiment remains cautious. Data from the prediction market Myriad shows that users assign only a 12% probability to an "altseason" beginning by July. This reflects a broader sentiment of fear, as illustrated by the Fear & Greed Index, even as individual altcoins like HYPE and Zcash see notable gains.
Li cautions that while NEAR is thriving, the overall market may not follow suit. She expects capital to be selective, concentrating on projects with strong narratives and established ecosystems. This selective investment approach could create opportunities for quality altcoins to outperform in the coming months, especially if Bitcoin maintains its current stability. Li's observation suggests that the best performances often arise during periods of skepticism, a sentiment echoed across the crypto space.
As NEAR Protocol continues to innovate and capture market attention, its role in the evolving interplay of AI and decentralized finance could redefine how these technologies are utilized in the future. Investors will be watching closely as developments unfold, particularly with scheduled upgrades expected to significantly expand NEAR's capabilities.
The stories that move AI & crypto markets — before the market reacts.
Free. 7am ET. Five stories. 62,400 readers.
