NEAR Token Rises 31% After Hayes Endorsement, Upgrade News

NEAR’s token gained about 31% over 24 hours, trading near $2.23 as of 12:25 p.m. ET and remaining more than 20% higher on the day. The token has climbed over 50% in the past month, putting its market capitalization near $3 billion.

Several developments coincided with the rally. Arthur Hayes described NEAR, HYPE and ZEC as “the holy trinity” of altcoins in a recent comment, which drew retail attention. Bitwise reported significant inflows into its NEAR exchange-traded product, and a former NEAR contributor, Vadim Zacodil, posted that the protocol’s buyback mechanisms and co-founder Illia Polosukhin’s background in artificial intelligence had helped raise interest.

NEAR is scheduled to deploy a major upgrade next month that introduces dynamic resharding. The feature is designed to reallocate network resources automatically as usage grows, with the goal of increasing capacity, reducing congestion and improving transaction speed for decentralized applications. The project has also emphasized privacy and confidential transactions as part of its technical roadmap.

Analysts have pointed to the protocol’s fee profile as a factor in investor interest. BitMEX Research analyst Shang Wu noted that “NEAR trades around 56x annualised fees,” describing it as cheaper than several major layer-1 peers and less expensive than LayerZero on a bridge-fee comparison. Wu added that rising fees, new AI-related features and an updated revenue capture mechanism would support a bullish case for the token if they materialize.

Institutional inflows into exchange-traded products and heightened retail interest have coincided with the price move. Market participants are tracking whether the upcoming resharding upgrade and any AI-focused feature releases lead to sustained increases in on-chain activity and fee revenue.