NEAR climbed to $2.8, posting a 15% daily gain as trading activity picked up. The move was tied to stronger usage of NEAR Intents, renewed market attention from Arthur Hayes, and institutional inflows ahead of a planned network upgrade in June.
NEAR Intents draws attention back to the protocol
One of the main drivers behind the rally is NEAR Intents, a transaction system built to simplify activity across multiple blockchains. Users specify the outcome they want, and third-party solvers handle the execution in the background. The example cited in the source describes swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana without manual multi-step processing.
Data from DefiLlama shows NEAR Intents has processed more than $19 billion in transaction volume so far and generated $32 million in fees. Those figures have helped bring NEAR back into focus after a long period of relatively muted attention.
Arthur Hayes names NEAR in his “holy trinity”
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes recently described NEAR as one of the “holy trinity” of crypto assets on social media, alongside Hyperliquid’s HYPE token and ZEC. He wrote that there is “still room left in the rally,” adding momentum to the token’s recent move.
The report also says interest in AI-linked and blockchain infrastructure tokens gave NEAR an extra 30% boost earlier this month. At the same time, market metrics pointed to a notable increase in institutional participation.
Institutional inflows rise before dynamic resharding
On the institutional side, the Europe-traded Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP has grown to nearly $40 million in assets, including $7 million in net inflows over the past week. That suggests professional investors have been adding exposure to the asset.
In June, NEAR is scheduled to launch dynamic resharding, an upgrade that will let the network split into new shards automatically as demand increases. According to the source, the change is intended to improve scalability and reduce congestion during periods of heavier usage. NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain focused on decentralized applications, AI infrastructure, and cross-chain transactions, using a proof-of-stake model and sharding architecture to support higher throughput.
Even after the latest rebound, NEAR remains far below its previous peak. The token reached around $20 in 2022, and current prices are still well short of that level.