NEAR rallies 75% in one week as short squeeze and AI rotation converge

The NEAR Protocol and its token are riding on a wave powered by a mix of short liquidations, renewed interest in AI-linked tokens, and growing fee revenue from its cross-chain settlement system, which has helped it to gain roughly 50% over the past seven days, trading near $2.73.

The rally started when the token finally broke out of a month-long lull where NEAR’s price traded  within a tight range between $1.20 and $1.75 for most of May. 

The rally, when it finally arrived, caused liquidations of over $9.85 million in short positions and forced buybacks that drove upward pressure.

Derivatives activity rose alongside the spot move, and open interest went up above $473 million. As of May 24, NEAR futures open interest had crossed $720 million.

NEAR is currently trading around $2.75 with a market capitalization of $3.57 billion and 24-hour volume above $1 billion as seen on CoinMarketCap.

Arthur Hayes names NEAR in ‘holy trinity’ trade

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes recently called NEAR, Hyperliquid (HYPE), and Zcash (ZEC) “the holy trinity of altcoins.” 

All three tokens listed by Hayes have performed better than Bitcoin (BTC) lately, with HYPE reaching an all-time high and ZEC logging multi-month peaks, as Cryptopolitan reported.

NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin joined Hayes to discuss “how the privacy revolution runs on NEAR.” They touched on ZEC, HYPE, and NEAR itself while linking the latest rally to the thesis around confidential computation and AI agent infrastructure.

Around 78% of listed tokens reportedly lost value on the day NEAR posted one of its largest single-session gains. 

Why is NEAR rallying? 

Apart from the technical setup, two protocol-level developments gave traders a fundamental basis for the NEAR trade.

First, NEAR’s Intents cross-chain settlement system has generated more than $33 million in fees in under a year, according to on-chain analyst @0xNairolf and Defillama on X. 

NEAR Intents have generated over $33M in fees since launch.

Track detailed usage on our comprehensive NEAR dashboard. https://t.co/KIwqZlXoaj pic.twitter.com/CmUeymJ7BT

— DefiLlama.com (@DefiLlama) May 25, 2026

The system processes swaps and bridge transactions across more than 35 blockchains, with settlement fees moving through programmatic NEAR purchases since February 2026. Analysts say it has created “a continuous demand floor.” NEAR Intents has handled over $10 billion in cumulative volume across more than 15.7 million swaps.

The second development that has turned the tide for NEAR is its leaning into AI branding with tangible product releases. 

A May 20 rollout by NEAR strips passwords and personally identifiable information from prompts before they reach large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Developer Kent with the X username, @cuongdc_real, stated on X that NEAR AI updated its model picker to include Google’s Gemma 4 31B, running on NEAR’s trusted execution environment infrastructure with end-to-end encryption.

CoinMarketCap describes NEAR as “a high-performance, AI-native platform built to power the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents.” Its co-founder, Polosukhin, previously co-authored a 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture, which is being used in today’s large language models.

Risks remain for late buyers

The daily active users on the NEAR network went down from nearly 3 million earlier in 2026 to roughly 266,000, according to Token Terminal data. Analysts see this as a potential warning sign, having observed the gap between price action and on-chain usage.

Dynamic resharding is an upcoming protocol upgrade coming soon, and it is designed to enable automatic scaling whenever there is a spike in demand. The execution may help the protocol to sustain its momentum and make its case to enterprise and AI developers beyond this week’s move.

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