NEAR jumped almost 80% in a week: what drove the cryptocurrency
NEAR cryptocurrency became one of the main leaders of the current rally in the digital asset market. The token gained more than 20% in a day and about 76% in a week. On Monday, September 21, NEAR price rose to about $4.4 versus $2.4–2.5 a week earlier.
At the time of writing, CoinMarketCap valued NEAR at about $4.4. Daily trading volume reached $2.3 billion, and market capitalization was $5.7 billion, placing the cryptocurrency 17th among the largest digital assets.
NEAR is growing significantly faster than the overall market, and there are several specific reasons for this move.
Zcash trading surged through NEAR
One of the main drivers was a spike in activity in NEAR Intents, a service that allows swapping assets between different blockchains without having to manually bridge coins or perform multiple intermediate steps.
Operations with Zcash (ZEC) grew especially noticeably. ZODL and Vizor crypto wallets integrated NEAR Intents for ZEC exchange, and daily Zcash transaction volume through this service increased about sixfold over the past week, CoinDesk reports.
In effect, NEAR infrastructure became one of the routes for trading Zcash, one of the largest cryptocurrencies currently rising most actively.
NEAR bet on confidential transactions
The second factor was the development of Confidential Intents, a technology for confidential execution of cross-chain operations.
An ordinary blockchain transaction before execution may reveal trade size, exchange direction and other parameters to network participants. This allows trading bots to try to front-run a large order or profit from it.
In NEAR, transactions go through a separate private shard connected to the main network via TEE infrastructure. This keeps operation parameters out of the public mempool and makes them inaccessible to front-running and a number of other MEV strategies.
On September 17, the project extended this concept to perpetual futures trading through Hyperliquid: positions opened via near.com now by default use a confidential funding route that makes it harder to link a trade to a specific wallet.
The $3.33 mark became a market target
Another catalyst was the NEAR@3.33 program. After total value locked in Confidential Intents exceeded $70 million, the project took the first balance snapshot to distribute 333,333 special tokens among active users of the service.
However, these special tokens could be converted into regular NEAR only if an additional condition was met: volume-weighted average price of NEAR had to stay at $3.33 or above for three consecutive days.
Thus, $3.33 became not just another level on the chart, but a clear price target for market participants.
By September 21, the condition was met: NEAR announced that the required three-day VWAP had been achieved, after which rewards were converted into regular tokens and distributed to program participants.
The size of the first pool itself is small. At the current price, 333,333 NEAR is worth about $1.5 million with a project market cap of about $5.7 billion. Thus, the program's impact on token supply is relatively minor—far more important was the market interest created around the $3.33 level.
Overall crypto market growth helped too
NEAR's rally is happening against a favorable external backdrop. On Monday, bitcoin broke above $84,000, and Ethereum, Solana, Sui and other major cryptocurrencies rose significantly as well. Later, bitcoin briefly climbed above $85,000.
However, NEAR is rising much faster than bitcoin, indicating the impact of project-specific news. The token added more than 20% in just one day, and trading volume almost equaled 40% of its market capitalization.
As a result, several factors coincided within a few days: a sharp rise in Zcash traffic through NEAR Intents, development of confidential trading tools, reaching $70 million in Confidential TVL, the NEAR@3.33 program, and general crypto market recovery.
After such a rapid rally, risks have also increased. NEAR gained about three-quarters of its value in a week, but at around $4.4 it still remains about 78% below its all-time high of $20.42 set in January 2022.
The key question now is whether high activity in NEAR Intents will persist after the first phase of the NEAR@3.33 program ends and the current hype around Zcash subsides.
