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The NEAR Doubling Event: 3 Major Trends Driving the Coin Price "Rocket Engine"

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AI, Privacy, and Buyback.

Original Title: "The Secret Behind NEAR's Doubling: 3 Major Trends Driving the Token Price"

On May 25, the native token of the public blockchain NEAR is priced at $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.50, pushing its market cap back above $30 billion.

Amidst the volatility of mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin, NEAR has shown an independent trend, standing out as one of the most eye-catching tokens alongside ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What exactly is the reason behind its surge?

AI Narrative

NEAR's co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a veteran in the field of AI. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, alongside Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, and others, who are all from Google Brain/Google Research.

This paper introduced the Transformer architecture, which is entirely based on the attention mechanism, greatly improving parallel training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of today's mainstream large-scale model frameworks like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.

From the early days, NEAR has positioned AI as a core strategy. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super app, integrating cross-chain swaps, privacy tools, and smart contract management in one platform, with built-in AI capabilities to support self-sovereign app scenarios. In November 2023, Illia also officially took on the role of NEAR Foundation CEO, focusing primarily on the AI core narrative.

In May, NVIDIA's financial report drove a rebound in the AI sector, with NEAR being seen as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, on par with projects like TAO.

On May 22, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, in an article, put NEAR on par with HYPE and ZEC, directly igniting market sentiment.

Privacy Public Chain

The blockchain has long faced the "transparent equals public" privacy dilemma. The skyrocketing prices of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR have brought the industry's attention back to the privacy track, prompting various protocols, including public chains, to begin incorporating privacy features into their protocols.

Founded in 2018, NEAR's initial core focus was not AI, but scalability. Its early progress was mainly centered around sharding technology, making it one of the hotly anticipated "Ethereum killers" at the time.

Due to this, NEAR's public sale on CoinList once caused the platform to crash. During the 2020-2021 bull market cycle, NEAR surged from $0.5 to a high of $20.59, becoming one of the most prominent tokens of that year.

However, as this current cycle progressed, the majority of old and new VC coins were met with market disdain. Even in this bull market cycle, NEAR only peaked at $9 in 2024 before plummeting, hitting a low of $0.84 in 2026.

With the official launch of NEAR Intents, privacy has become increasingly crucial. Intents, the core of cross-chain transactions, allows users to execute transactions based on intent. However, large transactions on the public chain are susceptible to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attacks, posing a significant obstacle to institutions, whales, and regular DeFi users alike.

The NEAR team began planning privacy as a critical addition to Intents. In late May of this year, the NEAR Intents team introduced Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents, enabling privacy-preserving cross-chain transfers of assets such as ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across 35+ chains. The sender, amount, and path are all concealed, with only the result displayed on the target chain, utilizing a combination of private shards and a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridge at its core.

NEAR also implemented an open privacy mode where user balances, transfers, and transaction activities are by default kept private, ensuring no data leakage for regular users, corporate users, or AI agents executing complex strategies. Concurrently, the launch of Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) further supports private multisig, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having processed a total of $68 million in confidential transactions.

Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR strikes a more practical balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain capabilities, directly catering to enterprise-level demands, thus driving TVL and developer activity back up.

NEAR Intents Fee Buyback

By October 2025, NEAR completed the final batch of initial supply unlocks, with a circulating supply approaching 100%.

NEAR implemented a dual mechanism of inflation + burning early on in the mainnet: a maximum annual 5% inflation (which was permanently halved to 2.5% in October 2025 through an upgrade), with 90% going to validators as rewards and 10% to the protocol treasury. As of 2026, the project has no more major unlocking events or linear unlocks, with only daily epoch reward emissions remaining (approximately 5.4 million NEAR released in the last 30 days, accounting for 0.4% of total supply).

In addition, NEAR Intents' transaction fee revenue directly buys back NEAR tokens on the market, creating significant buying pressure.

NEAR's Intent-driven cross-chain transaction layer allows users to simply express what outcome they desire (e.g., swapping BTC for SOL), providing the best execution path, supporting multiple chains, without the need for bridging/wrapping assets, and with low fees.

Previously, NEAR Intents had two fee components: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators), but the protocol fees now all flow back into the buyback path. The NEAR bought back is not necessarily burned immediately; instead, it is staked, locked, or removed from liquidity after repurchase. However, it still counts towards the total supply, reducing circulating supply pressure while also earning staking rewards.

According to the latest data from defiLlama, NEAR Intents' Total Value Locked (TVL) has exceeded $80 million, with daily fee generation fluctuating around $100,000, meaning the monthly buyback amount is around $3 million.

At the end of this month, the core development team Near One also announced the latest technical progress. By the end of Q2 2026, the team will release Dynamic Repartitions, significantly enhancing scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme and upgrade in June this year to enhance its resistance to quantum computing.