NEAR The most lively place this week is actually not on NEAR’s own chain. near.com has made perpetual trading default to “private,” and both matching and depth are entirely routed to Hyperliquid’s order book. The coin price has been climbing steadily, and in the Chinese news updates, most of the headlines only mention a sudden surge. What I want to figure out is this: what exactly does “private” hide, and how much of this rally comes from the product itself.
Let me lay it out first. Starting September 17, all perpetual positions opened on near.com go through a “private” sharded path to route funds; the source of deposits and account ownership are not visible to the outside world. This shard is maintained by seven validator nodes, and it connects to the mainnet via a TEE bridge. The trading instruments and leverage use Hyperliquid’s existing setup—on the front end it lists more than 50 markets and up to 40x leverage. near.com connecting to Hyperliquid for perpetuals began as early as June; this time, the only addition is making “private” the default. $NEAR in Binance spot jumped from the $2.30 close on September 13 to around $4.3—up nearly 90% in a bit over a week, and daily trading volume expanded to about ten times its usual level.
The most common misunderstanding in Chinese retellings is “on-chain invisibility.” What the privacy layer breaks is the linkage between wallets and positions: others can’t trace from the deposit path to find who owns that position. But the position itself is still posted on Hyperliquid’s public order book—direction, size, and liquidation all occur there. Big players can use it to hide identity, but they can’t hide the position; a 40x trade that can be seen and watched will still get hit—risk doesn’t disappear. Also, privacy is built on trust in seven nodes plus a TEE, which is more centralized than NEAR mainnet verification, so people watching should have that in mind.
The second question is how much of the rally is subsidized demand. On September 17, the privacy TVL surpassed $70 million and triggered the first batch of snapshots for the NEAR@3.33 incentive program. The rules are to allocate 333,333 milestone tokens to qualifying users: the privacy balance must exceed $100, and users must have had at least one privacy exchange. For any single wallet, the maximum allocation is 2%. The tokens are locked first. Only after NEAR’s three consecutive days’成交量-weighted average price is not below $3.33 will the tokens be converted 1:1 into NEAR. I calculated using Binance daily data myself: starting September 18, the three consecutive days’ volume-weighted average prices were all above $3.33. If the official threshold is close to that, the barrier has already been crossed.
At current prices, this incentive is worth roughly $1.4 million. Compared with daily trades in the billions of dollars, it’s almost negligible—it can’t prop up a rally of nearly 90%. The $3.33 level looks more like a price everyone is watching, concentrating attention on NEAR. The main driver of buy pressure is largely the launch of a usable product with trackable data. On September 19, the official said privacy TVL had already reached $90 million—up by more than $20 million in just over two days.
Now, consider what this really is: is it NEAR’s product advantage, or just Hyperliquid adding another front end? Hyperliquid has onboarded several front ends in these months. The perpetuals on Base App are supplied by Hyperliquid, and even the African exchange VALR has integrated its engine. To Hyperliquid, near.com is just one traffic entry point; most trading fees flow toward the matching side. What NEAR itself retains is the deposit leg: users can open positions directly with any assets from more than 30 chains—no manual cross-chain steps, and no need to create another account. The official says the total value routed via NEAR Intents over cross-chain has already exceeded $30 billion. According to co-founder Illia Polosukhin, it’s “AI does the front end, the blockchain does the back end.” Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi publicly praised this product as doing extremely well right now, and he also noted that they hold NEAR.
I agree the product is getting better, but I don’t agree that the entire rally should be credited to NEAR’s moat. Whether the routing and privacy layer can actually keep money there depends on whether TVL is still present after the incentives end. Most perpetual trading fees go to Hyperliquid; how the NEAR token will capture that portion of revenue currently has no clear answer.
On the contract side, the structure looks healthier than I expected. The notional open interest for Binance NEAR contracts rose from about $90 million on September 16 to $220 million, leverage clearly came in—but over the past few days, the funding rate has basically stayed around the 0.01% baseline, and longs haven’t been paying a premium just to secure positions. This rally has mainly been driven by spot.
And don’t ignore tailwinds in other segments. Zcash has also been moving up over the past month: from September 16 to 17 it expanded volume in sync with NEAR, and the privacy track overall has had momentum. NEAR has one extra “checkable” element beyond a pure privacy narrative—its product and TVL numbers. But once the segment sentiment ebbs, it can’t hold on either.
Risks should be made clear too. Privacy derivatives are not available in the U.S. and Canada, and regulators’ views on how these products will be handled are still unsettled. After incentives end, capital may withdraw. Once it’s already risen by nearly 90%, any negative catalyst will be amplified.
My view is: this market has real product support, but part of it is attention premium. You can watch two signals: whether privacy TVL can stay near $90 million after the first batch of rewards are claimed, and whether near.com will publish perpetual trading volume. If the former drops back below $70 million, I’ll conclude that most of the demand was drawn out primarily by incentives. #NEAR #Hyperliquid
Let me lay it out first. Starting September 17, all perpetual positions opened on near.com go through a “private” sharded path to route funds; the source of deposits and account ownership are not visible to the outside world. This shard is maintained by seven validator nodes, and it connects to the mainnet via a TEE bridge. The trading instruments and leverage use Hyperliquid’s existing setup—on the front end it lists more than 50 markets and up to 40x leverage. near.com connecting to Hyperliquid for perpetuals began as early as June; this time, the only addition is making “private” the default. $NEAR in Binance spot jumped from the $2.30 close on September 13 to around $4.3—up nearly 90% in a bit over a week, and daily trading volume expanded to about ten times its usual level.
The most common misunderstanding in Chinese retellings is “on-chain invisibility.” What the privacy layer breaks is the linkage between wallets and positions: others can’t trace from the deposit path to find who owns that position. But the position itself is still posted on Hyperliquid’s public order book—direction, size, and liquidation all occur there. Big players can use it to hide identity, but they can’t hide the position; a 40x trade that can be seen and watched will still get hit—risk doesn’t disappear. Also, privacy is built on trust in seven nodes plus a TEE, which is more centralized than NEAR mainnet verification, so people watching should have that in mind.
The second question is how much of the rally is subsidized demand. On September 17, the privacy TVL surpassed $70 million and triggered the first batch of snapshots for the NEAR@3.33 incentive program. The rules are to allocate 333,333 milestone tokens to qualifying users: the privacy balance must exceed $100, and users must have had at least one privacy exchange. For any single wallet, the maximum allocation is 2%. The tokens are locked first. Only after NEAR’s three consecutive days’成交量-weighted average price is not below $3.33 will the tokens be converted 1:1 into NEAR. I calculated using Binance daily data myself: starting September 18, the three consecutive days’ volume-weighted average prices were all above $3.33. If the official threshold is close to that, the barrier has already been crossed.
At current prices, this incentive is worth roughly $1.4 million. Compared with daily trades in the billions of dollars, it’s almost negligible—it can’t prop up a rally of nearly 90%. The $3.33 level looks more like a price everyone is watching, concentrating attention on NEAR. The main driver of buy pressure is largely the launch of a usable product with trackable data. On September 19, the official said privacy TVL had already reached $90 million—up by more than $20 million in just over two days.
Now, consider what this really is: is it NEAR’s product advantage, or just Hyperliquid adding another front end? Hyperliquid has onboarded several front ends in these months. The perpetuals on Base App are supplied by Hyperliquid, and even the African exchange VALR has integrated its engine. To Hyperliquid, near.com is just one traffic entry point; most trading fees flow toward the matching side. What NEAR itself retains is the deposit leg: users can open positions directly with any assets from more than 30 chains—no manual cross-chain steps, and no need to create another account. The official says the total value routed via NEAR Intents over cross-chain has already exceeded $30 billion. According to co-founder Illia Polosukhin, it’s “AI does the front end, the blockchain does the back end.” Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi publicly praised this product as doing extremely well right now, and he also noted that they hold NEAR.
I agree the product is getting better, but I don’t agree that the entire rally should be credited to NEAR’s moat. Whether the routing and privacy layer can actually keep money there depends on whether TVL is still present after the incentives end. Most perpetual trading fees go to Hyperliquid; how the NEAR token will capture that portion of revenue currently has no clear answer.
On the contract side, the structure looks healthier than I expected. The notional open interest for Binance NEAR contracts rose from about $90 million on September 16 to $220 million, leverage clearly came in—but over the past few days, the funding rate has basically stayed around the 0.01% baseline, and longs haven’t been paying a premium just to secure positions. This rally has mainly been driven by spot.
And don’t ignore tailwinds in other segments. Zcash has also been moving up over the past month: from September 16 to 17 it expanded volume in sync with NEAR, and the privacy track overall has had momentum. NEAR has one extra “checkable” element beyond a pure privacy narrative—its product and TVL numbers. But once the segment sentiment ebbs, it can’t hold on either.
Risks should be made clear too. Privacy derivatives are not available in the U.S. and Canada, and regulators’ views on how these products will be handled are still unsettled. After incentives end, capital may withdraw. Once it’s already risen by nearly 90%, any negative catalyst will be amplified.
My view is: this market has real product support, but part of it is attention premium. You can watch two signals: whether privacy TVL can stay near $90 million after the first batch of rewards are claimed, and whether near.com will publish perpetual trading volume. If the former drops back below $70 million, I’ll conclude that most of the demand was drawn out primarily by incentives. #NEAR #Hyperliquid