NEAR rallies 75% in one week as short squeeze and AI rotation converge
73. 75 for most of May. 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. 57 billion and 24-hour volume above $1 billion as seen on CoinMarketCap .
NEAR token is up more than 75% over the last week. ” 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 . ” 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.
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. 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.
” 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. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter.
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