NEAR is up roughly 90% in 30 days, and most of the takes I'm reading are wrong about why.
The retail take is that NEAR is the "AI agent chain," Arthur Hayes named it part of his holy trinity, and the chart did what charts do. That's not wrong... It's just thin.
I have to admit I was sleeping on NEAR in the early days. I was head-down on LeoDex and building support for the existing crosschain layers that I've worked with for so many years at this point (THORChain, Maya, ChainFlip, Relay, etc.). NEAR Intents was an asterisk on the dashboard and misunderstood at first. It quickly turned from something new into a core part of the conversation.
My background is that I love financial markets and business. I have been a long-time investor in Bitcoin (since circa 2012) and got into the ethos of Crosschain a while back when THORChain became the first protocol to introduce us to crosschain swaps.
I am a crosschain maximalist. I believe in a multi-chain future. There is no "one winner" for crypto assets nor is there one winner for crosschain swaps or really anything. The world is dynamic and it is only continuing to become increasingly dynamic with time. That's why LeoDex supports EVERY protocol that brings crosschain support to market. The ability for people to transact and use their crypto freely is my #1 ambition.
LeoDex routes real volume through NEAR Intents now, alongside our other major protocol partners. I see the flow in real time on leodex.io. So when I tell you NEAR's rally isn't a meme, I'm not pitching a bag I bought at the top. I'm pointing at the protocol my own product depends on every day and that I have front row seat in seeing grow from a niche product to hyperliquid-level dominance.
The actual thesis is simple. NEAR Intents quietly became the crosschain settlement layer the rest of crypto kept promising, and the market is finally pricing it correctly.
The Rally Has a Real Catalyst, and It Isn't AI Agents
As of late May 2026, NEAR trades at $2.74 at a $3.55B market cap. That's still 86% below the January 2022 all-time high of $20.49. Open interest on perps hit $713M in May which means the market is starting to pay even more attention to NEAR.
The hot take is that retail is chasing the AI agent narrative. While AI Agents are absolutely something Near is focused on servicing, there is a lot more to the story of this rally. Look at what actually shipped before the price started rising:
- On February 23, 2026, NEAR turned on the fee flywheel: 100% of NEAR Intents protocol fees now route to open-market buys of NEAR. 100% into spot. At a $77M daily trailing average in Intents volume. The deflationary threshold across the full token economy is roughly $177M/day. We are inside the same order of magnitude
- On March 2, 2026, Confidential Intents shipped. NEAR added a private execution lane on top of Intents. This is the move that attracted privacy capital to the NEAR order books... and if you follow my posts at all, you'll know that I constantly say privacy is going to be a leading narrative (hell it already is)
Ethereum devs theorize about the scaling Near devs actually ship and I've been awe-struck to see how fast the Near team executes on multiple fronts better than multi-billion dollar foundations with 10x the team size.
In May, Arthur Hayes called NEAR part of his holy trinity alongside HYPE and ZEC. The Hayes call certainly attracts a ton of eyeballs, but it's a catalyst on top of catalysts. Reordering: the fee flywheel + Intents growth, the confidential layer, and the sharding upgrade all landed first. Hayes brought it to the attention of mainstream crypto buyers but the Near team has been shipping and growing like mad.
The "AI agent chain" framing is downstream of this stack and will certainly drive a much larger TAM to the Near token in the long-run. But what's right in front of us today is a massive opportunity on its own.
How NEAR Intents Became Crosschain Infrastructure
NEAR was started in 2018 by Illia Polosukhin and Alex Skidanov. Illia is a former Google Machine Learning (ML) engineer and one of the contributors to the original "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper. The original mission was a crypto rail for international payments that didn't cost $40 to send. Mainnet shipped April 22, 2020.
The chain-abstraction pivot happened in 2024. Chain Signatures, NEAR's MPC-based crosschain signing primitive, hit mainnet on August 8, 2024 with 8 MPC nodes. That's the foundation NEAR Intents sits on and in my opinion its when the entire narrative really shifted.
NEAR Intents launched in beta in November 2024 and went full mainnet after ETHDenver 2025. The architecture is intent-based, not pool-based. You say what you want, off-chain solvers compete to fill it and settlement clears atomically. If nobody fills, you get your crypto back and try again/try a different intents swap.
It's fundamentally different from what OG Crosschain protocols do. Is it better? So far, it seems better in many ways. There are pros and cons to both approaches. But let's be honest here: Pooling capital and incentivizing users is so 2020. The game has changed dramatically from Uniswap's LP model and this is only the beginning of hyper efficient liquidity. Near has made a theoretical dream possible: drive massive swap volume without needing unsustainable vampire incentives.
- Cumulative volume just crossed $19B
- Daily Intents volume scaled from $1.5M to $24M
- 137,961 unique addresses transacted in the last 7 days alone
- 35+ chains live, 125+ assets. Bitcoin, Solana, TRON, Sui, Stellar, Starknet, Zcash, and the entire EVM stack are all routable from a single intent
The Near team is shipping at light speed. Adding chains and features seemingly overnight.
Illia framed the primitive in The Sequence Chat #835:
"An intent is a declaration of a desired outcome with constraints. It can be as simple as wanting to receive some asset on a given chain or as complex as building a house."
And then the part that actually matters for the next decade:
"Blockchain rails are the easiest for agents to use because they are natively designed for machines."
The AI agent narrative isn't a meme bolted onto NEAR. It's the same intent primitive aimed at a different user. A solver responding to a human's BTC-to-SOL request and a solver responding to an autonomous agent's USDC-to-stables-on-Sui request are the same primitive. NEAR built the rails first and the agents are showing up second.
Regardless of what business you're in, I have the same party line: build for humans and build for agents. B2C is business to customer, B2B is business to business and B2A is business to agent.
If you're building something that has 0 potential for Agent-use, I think you're missing the largest addressable market in the coming decades.
Near has done the B2C to B2B to B2A leap marvelously.
What Users and Investors Should Take From This
If you're a user, the math is simple. You want to swap BTC to USDC, ETH to SOL, anything to anything. You have a handful production-grade options. They route differently, they price differently and on any given day one is cheaper than the others.
LeoDex aggregates all of them so you don't have to pick. The fee on NEAR Intents is super cheap. Trade NEAR Intents on leodex.io today. We're constantly shipping more features for Near. BTC to ZEC is our #1 most traded route on LeoDex via the Near Protocol. We're continuing to see this scale as both Near and Zcash continue to grow rapidly. The ethos of LeoDex aligns perfectly: an Agent economy. Your privacy is the ultimate value and no KYC crypto swaps powered by the best protocols in the industry.
If you're an investor: NEAR is looking like it has incredible room to run. The previous ATH was $20. I believe NEAR has the potential to not only sprint back to $20 but teleport much higher beyond that as intents continue to scale, agentic payments become a reality and chain abstraction flips on for the masses.
Comparable L1 valuations:
- Solana sits at $49B - a 13x gap
- Avalanche at $4B - AVAX at the same market cap is a crime relative to how much scale and TAM Near has
- NEAR at $3.5B
- Sui at $5B with a $10.56B FDV despite much less usage than Near
Near Intents is the workhorse revenue and the conversation around confidential transactions (privacy) as well as chain abstraction and AI agents will teleport the TAM to much higher levels.
We are in the early days of Near's rise to greatness. Will we see ups and downs? I'm sure of it. That said, I think Near has some massive potential to take advantage of 3 leading narratives in crypto that I am following with the closest of eyes:
- Privacy (Zcash support and synergy being at the top of the list)
- Chain Abstraction (making crypto easier for the average person)
- Agentic payments (understanding B2A and actually building with it in mind)
Near shipped and the market is reacting. A non-KYC multichain future is critical to what we are all in this industry for.
Buy NEAR and trade any Near Intents route with the lowest fees in the industry on https://leodex.io!