NEAR rose as high as $3.45 on Sept. 18, posting a gain of more than 26% over 24 hours. Three days earlier, it had closed at $2.34, leaving the token up more than 45% over that stretch. The move was quickly framed around a “push to $3.33” campaign and a renewed focus on NEAR Intents.
$3.33 was written directly into the reward trigger
On Sept. 17, near.com said assets locked in the confidential mode of NEAR Intents had surpassed $70 million, and the first snapshot for the NEAR@3.33 incentive plan had been completed.
To qualify, users had to keep more than $100 in assets in a confidential account and complete at least one confidential swap. Eligible participants would receive 333,333 milestone tokens, with a cap of 2% of the total allocation per wallet.
Those tokens were not immediately sellable. Under the rules, they would convert 1:1 into transferable NEAR only if NEAR’s three-day volume-weighted average price reached or exceeded $3.33. At that price, the nominal value of the reward pool was about $1.11 million.
The design tied product use to a price condition. Users were first encouraged to move funds into confidential accounts and execute trades, then the three-day average-price requirement kept attention on NEAR even after the snapshot. A brief intraday spike would not be enough. The price had to hold around $3.33.
That also separated claiming from selling, unlike a standard airdrop that can bring immediate sell pressure once tokens are distributed.
The reward pool was too small to explain a $1.2 billion market-cap increase on its own
The report says the incentive by itself does not account for the full scale of the rally. Historical data from CoinGecko showed NEAR’s market capitalization climbing from about $3.22 billion on Sept. 15 to about $4.46 billion, an increase of more than $1.2 billion in three days. On that basis, the roughly $1.11 million reward pool amounted to only about 0.09% of the market-cap gain.
What the campaign did achieve, the article argues, was to push investors back toward the product and revenue data behind NEAR Intents. According to the NEAR Revenue Dashboard cited in the piece, NEAR Intents generated about $5.01 million in gross fees and about $1.58 million in net revenue over the past 30 days.
The report says that revenue came from frontend charges, quote improvement, and partner integrations rather than relying only on traditional layer-1 gas fees.
On-chain data also showed a buyback multisig address holding about 1.158 million NEAR. For a project that used to be discussed mainly in terms of sharding and chain performance, regularly updated trading revenue became a much more prominent part of the story.
NEAR Intents adds a privacy layer to cross-chain trading
NEAR Intents is described in the article as a cross-chain trading protocol built by NEAR. Users specify what asset they want to swap into another asset, while market makers source quotes and handle settlement. The confidential mode adds a privacy layer on top of that system.
As described in the source text, orders enter NEAR’s private shards, and public trading pools cannot see the trade direction, size, or submission time. The stated aim of the NEAR@3.33 plan was straightforward: bring assets and transaction count into this confidential mode.
That shift helped move the market’s focus away from NEAR’s older identity as a sharded public blockchain and toward its role as a private settlement rail for cross-chain trading.
A whale swap from ETH into ZEC offered a concrete use case
A set of whale transactions on Sept. 9 gave the privacy angle a more concrete example. Four addresses tied to the same entity, after roughly six months of inactivity, became active again. They first bought about $33.37 million worth of ETH through CowSwap, then used 2,500 ETH through NEAR Intents to acquire 6,601.37 ZEC worth about $8.21 million.
The trade paid a service fee of 16.75 ETH, or about $42,000. The article says large buyers willing to pay that fee were paying to keep the trading path from being openly tracked. The less that is exposed about order size, buying direction, and execution timing, the lower the chance of front-running or copy-trading pressure.
For NEAR, the report argues, that kind of real transaction says more than the number of addresses joining an incentive program. Users do not need to understand the NEAR chain first; the protocol can sit behind a cross-chain swap, complete settlement, and retain the fee revenue.
From a swap tool to a trading account with perpetuals
The report also says near.com has connected perpetual contracts supplied with market access and liquidity by Hyperliquid to confidential accounts. Users can deposit assets from different chains and open positions from the same account.
Under that setup, position size, entry price, and trade direction do not appear directly in public trading pools. A cross-chain swap can end once the trade is completed. Perpetuals, by contrast, leave open positions, margin balances, and recurring fees.
That pushes NEAR Intents beyond a swap tool and toward a trading-account product.
The narrative change became a central part of the rally
The article’s conclusion is that the more important catalyst was a change in narrative. The market had long treated NEAR as an older public-chain project left from the previous cycle. It is now starting to view the network through confidential swaps, perpetual trading, and protocol revenue, as a private settlement channel behind cross-chain trading.
In the article’s framing, that shift mattered more to the token’s short- to medium-term price action than the incentive campaign alone.