NEAR Protocol, a Layer 1 blockchain, extended its multi-week rally on Sunday, climbing approximately 5% in the last 24 hours to trade at $2.54 with a market cap of $3.29 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
The token is now up over 66% on the weekly chart, making it one of the strongest-performing assets among the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
The move stands out against a largely flat broader market. Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, gained just 0.22% on the day, and the total crypto market cap was virtually unchanged at 0.10%, indicating that NEAR’s rally is not a beta play on general market strength but rather a token-specific move driven by a confluence of catalysts.
At the time of writing, NEAR’s 24-hour trading volume stood at approximately $782 million, with a volume-to-market-cap ratio of 23.64%. The circulating supply sits at 1.29 billion NEAR out of a total supply of 1.29 billion, meaning the token is fully circulated. Fully diluted valuation (FDV), the theoretical market cap if all tokens were in circulation, stands at $3.29 billion.
What is driving the rally
The current surge traces back to several catalysts that stacked on top of each other over the past week.
Arthur Hayes’ “Holy Trinity” Endorsement
On May 22, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX and CIO of investment firm Maelstrom, publicly named NEAR Protocol as part of his “holy trinity” of altcoins, alongside Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Zcash (ZEC). The endorsement triggered an immediate 30% spike on that day alone, pushing NEAR to a six-month high above $2.30.
Hayes remains one of the most-followed voices in crypto markets. His backing drew significant retail and speculative attention, with more than $9 million in short positions liquidated during the move, according to CoinGlass liquidation data.
NVIDIA Earnings Spillover and AI Token Rotation
The rally also drew strength from NVIDIA, the dominant AI chipmaker, and its first-quarter FY2027 earnings report, released on May 20. The chipmaker reported record-breaking revenue of $81.6 billion, an 85% year-over-year increase, alongside $58.3 billion in quarterly profits.
The results confirmed that spending on AI infrastructure is accelerating, and crypto traders rotated into AI-themed tokens in response.
NEAR has historically rallied alongside NVIDIA earnings events. In February, the token surged more than 50% following NVIDIA’s Q4 2025 earnings.
NEAR’s positioning as an AI-native blockchain gives it direct relevance to this narrative. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, a machine learning researcher, co-authored the 2018 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” the foundational research behind modern transformer-based AI models. The protocol has leaned into this pedigree by building out AI agent infrastructure, including an AI Agent Market and a confidential GPU marketplace.
Dynamic resharding and v2.13 network upgrade
On May 20, NEAR Protocol announced that its most significant infrastructure upgrade since mainnet launch will go live in June. The v2.13 upgrade introduces dynamic resharding, an automated scaling feature that allows the network to add or remove shards, independent partitions that process transactions in parallel, based on demand without requiring a governance vote or manual validator coordination.
Previously, adding a shard required weeks of coordination and a staged rollout. Dynamic resharding eliminates this bottleneck, which is particularly critical for NEAR’s AI-focused roadmap where autonomous agents transact at machine speed, asThe Crypto Times reported on May 22.
The same upgrade will also introduce post-quantum-safe signing using FIPS-204 (ML-DSA), a lattice-based digital signature standard approved by NIST, making NEAR one of the first major blockchains to ship both automated scaling and quantum-resistant cryptography in a single release.
AI Privacy Features
Between May 20 and May 22, the NEAR team also rolled out new AI privacy features that strip passwords and personal information from user prompts before they reach external AI models. This development taps into both the AI and data privacy narratives simultaneously, adding another layer of bullish sentiment.
Institutional interest building
The rally is not purely retail-driven. Bitwise, a crypto asset management firm, operates a European NEAR Staking ETP that has grown to approximately $36 million in assets under management, with Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley disclosing $7 million in inflows during the week of the initial breakout.
On the ETF front, Grayscale, a major digital asset investment firm, filed to convert its NEAR Trust into a spot ETF under the ticker GSNR in January 2026, with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision expected around September 2026, according to CoinMarketCap data. A separate Bitwise spot NEAR ETF filing from May 2025 is also pending. An approved ETF would open the door to regulated institutional capital flows.
Technical picture
On the 1-hour chart from TradingView, a widely used charting platform, NEAR/USDT is trading at $2.548 on Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, with a session high of $2.578. The token has been holding above the $2.40 level since May 24, building a base above the previous resistance zone.
The Relative Strength Index or RSI (14) on the hourly timeframe reads 53.31, sitting in neutral territory after pulling back from overbought levels above 70 seen earlier in the week around May 22 to May 23. This suggests the token has cooled off from the initial momentum spike without breaking down.
Volume on the latest leg higher is relatively lower compared to the explosive volume seen during the May 22 to May 23 breakout, which briefly pushed 24-hour volume above $1 billion. This volume divergence is worth watching. If NEAR can attract fresh buying interest and push through the $2.60 area with conviction, it could set up a continuation toward higher levels. On the downside, the $2.40 to $2.50 zone now acts as near-term support, with $2.30 serving as a deeper floor from the initial breakout level.
NEAR remains well below its all-time high of $20.44 set in January 2022.
The bigger picture
NEAR’s rally over the past week has been driven by a combination of a high-profile endorsement, strong AI sector tailwinds from NVIDIA, substantive protocol upgrades, and growing institutional positioning through exchange-traded products and ETF filings.
The token is now ranked number 30 by market cap and has outperformed the vast majority of the top 50 assets over the past seven days. Whether this momentum sustains will likely depend on two near-term catalysts: the successful rollout of the v2.13 dynamic resharding upgrade in June and the SEC’s timeline on the Grayscale GSNR ETF application.
