NEAR rallied sharply on Sept. 18. Bitget market data showed the token rising above $3.5 at its peak, up more than 30% over 24 hours. The move sent NEAR to its highest price since March 2025 and brought its market capitalization back to around $4.5 billion.
The immediate catalyst was not a broad narrative alone. It was a set of product milestones that had already been confirmed three days earlier: Confidential Intents TVL moved past $70 million, and the first NEAR@3.33 snapshot was completed.
Confidential TVL milestone has been reached
On Sept. 15, NEAR said its Confidential TVL had reached $70 million and that the milestone incentive snapshot had been completed.
Under rules laid out in an official blog post on June 11, Drop 1 distributes 333,333 milestone tokens once aggregate Confidential Intents TVL reaches $70 million. Eligible accounts must maintain more than $100 in confidential balances and complete at least one confidential swap. A single wallet can receive no more than 2% of the reward pool.
The tokens do not become immediately liquid. They are locked on arrival and cannot be sold or transferred. They can only convert 1:1 into circulating NEAR if NEAR’s volume-weighted average price stays at or above $3.33 for three consecutive trading days.
That means crossing the confidential trading TVL threshold does not instantly add a new batch of sellable supply to the market. Against a circulating supply of about 1.307 billion tokens, the 333,333-token distribution looks more like a signal than a direct shift in supply and demand. Spot price has already traded above $3.33, but the three-day VWAP condition has not yet been satisfied.
The climb in TVL was visible before the breakout
The milestone did not appear out of nowhere. NEAR had already published a series of progress updates. On Aug. 22, the project said confidential TVL had passed $35 million. On Aug. 31, it said the figure had moved above $50 million.
According to the latest data from Dune, aggregate Intents TVL stands at about $169 million. Of that total, confidential trading has risen to more than $72 million, while public trading is roughly $100 million. The report said confidential TVL has been climbing sharply since May this year.
Protocol TVL and fee revenue have also risen
DefiLlama data shows NEAR protocol TVL at $217.66 million, with about $5.27 million in fee revenue over the past 30 days.
The report noted that while revenue across many crypto protocols has been unstable, and in some cases absent, NEAR’s daily fee revenue has stayed steady and at times increased sharply.
NEAR turned on its fee switch in February this year. Since then, protocol fees have been used to buy back NEAR on the open market, and 100% of front-end fees have also gone to buybacks. According to official NEAR data, captured protocol fees have now risen to $46.36 million.
Privacy and AI themes moved together
Other privacy-linked assets also rose over the same period. ZEC, for example, briefly climbed above $1,500. In trading terms, that made it easier for the market to place NEAR in the same basket.
At the product level, NEAR is presenting confidential execution for cross-chain settlement. The report said trades are routed into private shards to reduce mempool exposure, front-running and strategy leakage, while avoiding the heavier cost of zero-knowledge proof systems. It said the design covers more than 30 connected chains. In that framing, NEAR does not need to win over the core privacy-coin base to monetize privacy. It can charge on routing in and out, much like perpetual protocols charge on trading activity and bridges charge on cross-chain flow.
Bankless co-founder David Hoffman wrote that NEAR can be seen as a generalized version of ZEC: ZEC mainly provides privacy for funds, while NEAR is aimed at providing privacy for commercial activity. He also said ZEC in privacy pools does not make the rest of a user’s life private, while NEAR can be used in privacy use cases beyond money.
AI-linked trading interest returned as well
The article also said that during the global semiconductor stock rally in July, some crypto tokens tracked the theme rather than sitting it out. NEAR-USDT showed a relatively high correlation with AI-themed market moves, rising and falling in step with them. That relationship, the report said, has been reinforced again as AI-related stocks recovered recently.
NEAR has been promoting an "AI + blockchain" narrative externally, with a focus on AI agents and data infrastructure. As a result, its price action has often been influenced by sentiment tied to AI-related themes. On Sept. 18, semiconductor shares in both U.S. and A-share markets posted strong gains, which also supported AI-related crypto tokens.
The report added that as crypto markets become more closely tied to traditional finance, traders have more tools to position around the macro themes that dominate markets.
