Near Protocol Token Surges 80% Amid Privacy-Focused Expansion

Near Protocol’s native token surged nearly 80% over the past week, outpacing the wider crypto market as the network expanded its privacy-focused trading services.

On Monday, NEAR traded around $4.29, up about 78.2% over seven days and 22% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization rose about 6% over the same seven-day period.

On Thursday, Near Protocol said deposits and withdrawals for perpetual futures trading through near.com were now confidential by default. Near said the feature obscures the link between a trader’s funding wallet and a dedicated Hyperliquid trading account.

On the same day, Near said near.com’s confidential total value locked (TVL) had crossed $70 million, triggering the first snapshot under its [email protected] incentive program. The program allocated 333,333 milestone tokens for the first distribution. Under the program’s rules, those tokens unlock and convert to NEAR when its three-day volume-weighted average price reaches at least $3.33.

NEAR Intents reaches $29.3 billion in cumulative volume

NEAR Intents lets users request cross-chain swaps, with market makers competing to execute them.

The NEAR Intents Explorer showed about $29.3 billion in cumulative volume and $842 million over the past seven days on Monday. Privacy-focused Zcash wallet ZODL was its third-largest referral source by volume over the preceding 24 hours, generating about $3.8 million across 458 transactions.

A swap involving roughly $613,000 worth of ZEC was also among the largest transactions displayed by the explorer for the preceding 24 hours.

Bitwise research analyst Camran Khosravi said Near and Zcash are “complements,” arguing that Near gives ZEC holders confidential cross-chain infrastructure and access to liquidity.

He also cautioned that NEAR Intents’ TVL can rise when the price of ZEC already held within the system increases, even without new deposits.

Near has also extended its privacy focus beyond trading. In July, NEAR AI introduced staking-based payments that let users stake NEAR to receive credits for confidential AI inference and agent hosting while retaining ownership of the underlying tokens.