BEHIND THE NEAR DOUBLE: 3
Author: Mah, Foresight News
ON MAY 25, THE CURRENT PRICE OF NEAR IS $2.37. SINCE THE BEGINNING OF MAY, NEAR HAS GONE FROM A LOW POINT OF $1.24 TO A HIGH OF $2.50 AND THE MARKET VALUE HAS RETURNED TO OVER $3 BILLION. WHEN MAINSTREAM ENCRYPTED ASSETS LIKE BITCOIN SHOCK, NEAR EMERGED FROM INDEPENDENCE AS ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST COINS OUTSIDE OF ZEC, ONDO AND HYPE, WHAT WAS THE REASON FOR THE EXPLOSION
AI NARRATIVE
The co-founder of the NEAR, Illia Polosukhin, was a senior member of AI, and Illia was one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, including Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazer and others, all from Google Brain / Google Research. The paper presented the Transformer architecture, which is based solely on a focus mechanism and greatly enhances the efficiency of parallel training and model size. That's where all the major mainstream model frameworks of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini are today。
NEAR has been using AI as its core strategy since early. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com Super Application, which integrates cross-chain conversion, privacy tools, smart contract management and incorporates AI capabilities to support autonomous proxy applications. In November 2023, Illia also officially assumed the NEAR Foundation CEO to focus on the AI core narrative。
IN MAY, THE INGWEIDA NEWS LED THE WHOLE OF THE AI PLATE TO WARM UP, AND NEAR WAS SEEN AS THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE DECENTRALISED AI INFRASTRUCTURE, ALONGSIDE TAO, ETC。
On May 22nd, the co-founder of BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, in his article, shouted "NEAR, along with HYPE, ZEC, directly ignited market sentiment."。
Private public chain
THE CHAIN OF BLOCKS HAS LONG FACED A "TRANSPARENT OR OPEN" PRIVACY DILEMMA. THE SURGE IN PRIVATE CURRENCY SUCH AS ZEC AND XMR HAS LED THE INDUSTRY TO REFOCUS ITS PRIVACY TRACK, AND AGREEMENTS, INCLUDING THE PUBLIC CHAIN, HAVE BEGUN TO ADD PRIVACY FUNCTIONS TO THE PROTOCOL。
NEAR WAS CREATED IN 2018, AND THE CORE LOCATION AT THE BEGINNING WAS AI, BUT IT WAS OUTREACH. THE FIRST OF ITS KIND, WHICH HAS BEEN CONTINUALLY OPTIMIZED, IS MAINLY CENTRED ON FRAGMENTATION TECHNOLOGY, ONE OF THE “HOT-DOORS” CHAINS OF THE THEN-NAMED TAIFUNG KILLERS。
And that's why, at a public call on the CoinList, the latter website was shut down, and in the cycle of cattle markets in 2020-2021, the NEAR surged from US$ 0.5 to a peak of US$ 20.59, making it the most visible star token of the year。
BUT WHEN THE TIME CAME TO THE CURRENT CYCLE, THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE OLD AND NEW VCS WERE REJECTED BY THE MARKET, SO THAT, EVEN IN THE CURRENT CYCLE OF CATTLE, THE NEAR ONLY HIT THE HIGH POINT OF $9 IN 2024, THEN WENT DOWN, WITH ITS CURRENCY PRICES FALLING TO A MINIMUM OF $0.84 IN 2026。
Once the NEAR Intents are officially online, privacy needs begin to be very important. Intents is at the heart of a cross-chain transaction, where the intent of the user is expressed, but large transactions in the open chain are vulnerable to MEV (maximum recoverable value), a disadvantage that is not a small obstacle to institutions, large households or ordinary DeFi users。
The NEAR team began planning privacy as an important complement to Intents, and in late May this year, the NEAR Intens team went online to support the transfer of assets such as ETH, BTC, SOL, USDC across the 35+ chain. The sender, the amount, the path are all hidden and the results are shown only in the target chain, with a private segment +TEE bridge at the bottom。
The NEAR also opens up privacy models, user balances, transfers, and default privacy of transactions that do not lead to data leakage when common users, business users or AI agents implement complex strategies. The Commonwealth Treaties (Trezu), launched during the same period, has further supported privacy overwriting, payroll, cross-chain payments and has processed a cumulative amount of $68 million in confidential transactions。
The NEAR balance between privacy and availability, cross-chain, and direct demand at the enterprise level is more relevant than pure private currency such as Zcash, and promotes the recovery of TVL activities from developers。
NEAR Intents Repurchase Fees
IN OCTOBER 2025, NEAR COMPLETED THE FINAL BATCH OF INITIAL SUPPLY UNLOCKED WITH A CIRCULATION RATE OF NEARLY 100%。
NEAR designed a double mechanism for inflation + combustion from the early days of the main network: the highest 5% inflation per year (which was permanently halved to 2.5% in October 2025 through upgrading), 90% of which provided incentives to certifyers and 10% entered the protocol vault. In 2026, the project was free of large-scale or linear unlocking events, leaving only daily epoch incentives (about 5.4 million NEARs, or 0.4 per cent of the total supply, were released over the last 30 days)。
In addition to this, NEAR Intents billing income is directly repurchased in the market for NEAR coins, which also brings with it a large buyout。
Intent on the NEAR protocol drives the cross-chain transaction layer, and users simply express what they want, for example, by replacing BTC with SOL, providing the best execution path, supporting multi-chain, non-bridge/packaging assets, and low cost。
NEAR Intents previously had two components: protocol fees and distribution fees (and shares with third-party integrators), but the agreement fees are now fully repurchaseable. The bought NEAR does not need to burn down immediately, but rather to pledge, lock or remove liquidity, but it is still counted in the total supply, reducing the pressure on the disk while earning the collateral gains。
According to the latest data from defiLlama, NEAR Intens has over $80 million in TVL and its daily cost fluctuates from $100,000 to $3 million per month。
At the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, also released an update on technological developments, and the team will release dynamic rescoring at the end of the second quarter of 2026, significantly increasing its scalability. In addition, the team will introduce and upgrade the NEAR Back Quantum Security Signing Program in June this year to increase its resistance to quantum computing。
