NEAR climbs 15% amid rising traction in cross-chain product adoption

NEAR Protocol’s token continued its upward momentum, rising 15% in the past 24 hours to around $2.8 and completing a month-long surge that has seen its price double.

The rally has been fueled by increasing adoption of NEAR Intents, the project’s cross-chain transaction framework. This system allows users to specify an intended result—such as swapping USDC on Ethereum for SOL on Solana—while external solvers execute the process behind the scenes.

According to DefiLlama, NEAR Intents has handled over $19 billion in cumulative transaction volume and generated about $32 million in fees, helping revive interest in the ecosystem after months of relatively flat price action.

Market sentiment strengthened further after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes named NEAR, Hyperliquid’s HYPE, and ZEC as crypto’s “holy trinity,” noting that the current rally could still have significant upside.

Earlier in the month, NEAR had already advanced roughly 30% as traders rotated back into tokens tied to artificial intelligence and blockchain infrastructure. Institutional demand has also been picking up, with the Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP in Europe expanding to around $40 million in assets under management after attracting $7 million in weekly inflows.

Attention is now turning to a planned network upgrade in June, which will introduce dynamic resharding. This feature is designed to improve scalability by automatically splitting network shards as demand rises, enabling more efficient handling of high transaction volumes.

Despite the recent gains, NEAR remains far below its 2022 peak of nearly $20.

NEAR is a layer-1 blockchain focused on decentralized applications, AI infrastructure, and cross-chain functionality. It uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and employs sharding to support high throughput while simplifying interactions across different blockchain networks.