Putting these two numbers together is why I want to write $NEAR : the price rose 87% over 7 days, while the protocol’s net fees over 30 days were only about $757,500.

This doesn’t mean NEAR is bad. I understand what it’s doing, and it’s doing it pretty deeply. But figuring out whether the “reason for the price increase” and “fundamental improvement” are the same thing is crucial for judging how things will go next.

First look at the project. NEAR is a sharded L1 chain, and starting in 2024 it shifted the narrative toward “AI-native + chain abstraction.” Founder Illia Polosukhin is a former Google researcher and one of the authors of the Transformer paper—this background has been repeatedly mentioned after 2023, and there’s good reason. The other founder is Alex Skidanov.

The most solid figure on the product side is NEAR Intents: cumulative settlement volume has exceeded $30 billion, covering more than 30 chains, with an average per-transaction fee rate of about 0.0001%. This number is real, but the protocol revenue it brings is thin—which is exactly what the comparison above is referring to.

In its fundraising history: in May 2020, a16z led a $21 million round; in 2021, Three Arrows Capital led a $150 million round; later, Tiger Global led a $350 million round, valuing it at about $10 billion. In 2022, the ecosystem plan’s official stated figure was $800 million—here we need to correct a widely circulated claim; many articles say $500 million.

Tokenomics has an important change: starting in October 2025, the maximum annualized inflation rate was reduced from 5% to 2.5%. Also, its maximum supply is still not set to a fixed number—unlike coins with a fixed total supply.

Binance listed it on October 14, 2020. It opened four trading pairs and charged a listing fee of 0 BNB. It doesn’t carry any Binance risk labels—none of the five rounds of observation-label expansion lists in 2026 include it.

So how did this September rally come about? I’ve seen four explanations: the privacy narrative heating up again, renewed attention to the scale of Intents, privacy-sector linkage driven by Zcash, and unlocked related incentives. Some analysis also suggests there was short-covering involved—combined with the appearance of short squeeze alongside Bitcoin in the same period—which makes sense.

There’s a proposal worth tracking, but it hasn’t been implemented yet: on August 4, 2026, Illia initiated a discussion proposal for a Sovereign Fund, starting with a NEAR-equivalent amount of $30 million. The long-term goal is to achieve a fixed supply. As of my research, it’s still under discussion with no voting result yet. This is a potential shift toward deflationary policy, but at the moment it’s only a proposal.

On risk: the top 10 wallets of House of Stake control about 85.2% of voting power, and 83% of the locked stake comes from 15 large transactions—so governance concentration is on the high side. Historically, there have also been under-collateralization events involving USN. In addition, CoinGecko still lists several historical tags for it: SEC securities charges, FTX holdings, and an Alameda investment portfolio.

Today’s trading volume is 299.6M, the largest among this group—more than double the second place.

This article compiles public information and personal viewpoints and does not constitute investment advice. Data comes from exchange announcements, CoinGecko, the project’s official documentation, and public reports. There may be delays or errors—please verify for yourself.