NEAR surged 15% as cumulative volume on its cross-chain Intents product surpassed $19 billion.
Crypto News
NEAR Protocol (NEAR) climbed 15% over 24 hours to $2.80 on May 25, extending a 30-day rally that has pushed the token's price up approximately 90%. The move came as traders rotated back into tokens linked to AI infrastructure and cross-chain applications.
The network's cross-chain transaction product, NEAR Intents, has been central to renewed investor interest. The system lets users specify a desired outcome, such as swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana, while third-party solvers execute the transaction in the background.
DefiLlama data shows NEAR Intents has processed more than $19 billion in cumulative volume and generated approximately $32 million in fees. Those figures have drawn renewed attention to the protocol after months of limited price activity.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes named NEAR alongside $HYPE and $ZEC in an X post, calling the three tokens crypto's "holy trinity." He said the rally still had "a long way to go."
Institutional Demand and a June Network Upgrade
Institutional participation has also grown. The Bitwise NEAR Staking exchange-traded product (ETP), listed in Europe, has reached approximately $40 million in assets under management and recorded $7 million in inflows in a single week.
Investors are also watching a network upgrade scheduled for June 2026 that introduces dynamic resharding. The mechanism automatically splits network shards as transaction demand rises, improving the chain's ability to handle high volumes without manual intervention. The change is intended to improve scalability during peak usage periods.
Despite the rally, NEAR remains well below its 2022 peak of around $20. NEAR Protocol is a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain focused on cross-chain transactions and AI infrastructure, using sharding to manage throughput at scale.
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