TL;DR:
- NEAR recorded a 30% surge in the last 24 hours and has gained 60% over the past month, leading gains among altcoins.
- The rally coincides with three protocol upgrades: confidential on-chain treasuries, AI prompt privacy, and automatic network scaling.
- On the prediction market Myriad, users assign only a 12% probability to an “altseason” before July 2026.
NEAR Protocol is currently trading around $2.26 and has gained 60% over the past month, with a surge of 30% in the last 24 hours that positions it as the top-performing asset among large-cap altcoins. The jump comfortably outpaces gains from Worldcoin, at 12%, and Venice Token, at 8%, over the same period, according to CoinGecko data.
Part of the rally reflects a capital rotation after months in which Bitcoin absorbed most of the available liquidity. Sammi Li, CEO of exchange Ju.com, described NEAR as “one of the most obvious beneficiaries” of that flow, and noted that the project’s longstanding positioning around artificial intelligence makes it a natural destination when the market seeks exposure to that sector.
Key Upgrades in NEAR
The rally was accompanied by a set of technical announcements made between May 20 and 22. First, Trezu launched Confidential Treasuries, a private on-chain financial management product that includes multisig, payroll, balance administration, and cross-chain payments across more than 35 networks. The solution runs on NEAR’s private sharding and Intents infrastructure. The protocol’s official account reported that $68 million moved confidentially through near.com over the past month.
Additionally, NEAR AI implemented automatic anonymization of personal information in prompts sent to closed models such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, ensuring that sensitive data does not leave the user’s device.
The third upgrade is the most far-reaching. Illia Polosukhin announced the arrival of dynamic resharding as part of upgrade 2.13, scheduled for June 2026. The mechanism allows shards to split automatically upon reaching a certain state size, which would enable scaling to more than 70 shards with throughput exceeding that of Visa, according to Polosukhin himself.
Solid Narrative but with Caution
Despite explosive moves in specific assets such as HYPE, Ondo, and Zcash, broad-based optimism has yet to fully take hold. On Myriad, the prediction platform owned by Dastan—parent company of Decrypt—users assign just a 12% probability to an altseason beginning before July, a figure that did not change throughout May.
Li warned that prices can move “much faster than fundamentals” once momentum takes hold, and described part of the rally as narrative-driven. Even so, he considered the persistent caution to be constructive, and argued that capital will remain concentrated in projects with real ecosystems, in a market “far more selective than previous cycles”.
