Near token jumps more than 30% as traders position for June network upgrade
Price surge and market size
The NEAR token climbed as much as 31% over the past 24 hours, trading around $2.23 by midday and holding gains of more than 20% even as bitcoin weakened. By Friday afternoon, NEAR’s market capitalization was close to $3 billion.
Later in the session, the token changed hands near $2.26, with 24‑hour trading volume above $1 billion and a market value of roughly $2.93 billion, indicating strong and sustained demand.
Drivers: institutional demand, buybacks, and upgrade catalyst
Market participants linked the move to rising institutional demand, protocol-led token buyback efforts, and a scheduled June network upgrade focused on scalability.
Momentum was also boosted by public comments from Arthur Hayes, who recently grouped NEAR with HYPE and ZEC as leading alternative cryptocurrencies.
Hayes calls NEAR part of a “holy trinity”
Hayes’ firm, Maelstrom, disclosed that it had rotated capital into HYPE, ZEC, and NEAR, describing them as the “holy trinity” and his preferred trades.
Such visible repositioning by a prominent market figure has historically preceded broader attention and higher trading activity across digital assets.
Evidence of institutional participation
Zacodil, a former contributor to the protocol, pointed on social media to inflows into Bitwise’s NEAR Staking exchange-traded product as a sign of growing institutional participation.
The Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP, aimed at European clients, recorded about $3 million in net inflows this week, lifting assets under management to around $36 million.
Zacodil also highlighted founder Illia Polosukhin’s background in artificial intelligence as a key factor drawing interest to the ecosystem.
Core upgrade: dynamic resharding and scalability
The June network upgrade will introduce dynamic resharding, allowing the network to add capacity automatically as transaction volumes rise.
Previously, increasing capacity required manual intervention and could take months, raising the risk of slowdowns or higher costs during traffic spikes.
The automated mechanism is intended to keep fees and confirmation times more stable, directly affecting user experience and the feasibility of applications built on the protocol.
AI and high-frequency on-chain activity
Project developers frame dynamic resharding as critical for a future in which autonomous AI agents transact at high frequency on the blockchain.
NEAR continues to present itself as an AI-aligned ecosystem while competing as a Layer 1 blockchain aimed at simplifying and accelerating decentralized applications.
Valuation: fees multiple and sector comparison
Analyst Wu noted earlier this month that NEAR changes hands at about 56 times annualized fees, a level he said is below typical valuations seen in other Layer 1 blockchains and bridge-fee projects such as ZRO.
He argued that continued growth in network fees, combined with the rollout of AI‑driven tools, could support the current uptrend.
A lower multiple of annualized fees suggests the token’s market value may be less stretched relative to the economic activity it facilitates, offering one metric for comparing it with peers.
Privacy, security, and post‑quantum planning
Beyond scalability, developers are working on privacy features and confidential transactions, an area still widely regarded as a difficult challenge for blockchains.
The team is also preparing a post‑quantum‑safe signing scheme, a forward-looking security measure designed to guard against potential threats from future quantum‑level computing capabilities.
Want to understand how AI and crypto intersect? Explore our guide on AI complementing blockchain to spot the next NEAR-like trend.
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