NEAR Protocol's native token has surged more than 74% over the past month as investors rotate back into privacy-focused crypto infrastructure and position ahead of major protocol upgrades expected next month.
NEAR Rallies as Privacy Push, Scaling Upgrades Drive Renewed Demand
25 May 2026 - 14:31 CEST
By Matt Neill
The rally has pushed NEAR back above $2 for the first time since February, wiping out nearly $6mn in bearish positions over a 24-hour period last week as the token broke above key resistance levels, according to CoinGlass data.
The move comes as investors revisit privacy-linked digital assets following strong gains in tokens such as Zcash. Market attention has increasingly shifted toward projects offering confidential payments and cross-chain settlement tools as institutions and developers seek alternatives to fully transparent blockchain transactions.
NEAR has positioned itself within that trend through its Confidential Intents infrastructure and a series of scalability upgrades tied to AI-driven transaction growth.
Privacy features gain traction
NEAR recently added private USDC payments to its AI agent marketplace through its Confidential Intents system, allowing users and autonomous AI agents to transact without publicly exposing wallet relationships or payment amounts.
The feature uses a private NEAR shard and trusted execution environment infrastructure rather than zero-knowledge proofs. The protocol said the system is designed to support commercial AI applications in which firms do not want transaction histories or counterparties to be visible on public ledgers.
The privacy push builds on infrastructure originally used to facilitate private cross-chain transfers linked to ZEC activity. During the height of the privacy token rally in late 2025, ZEC accounted for roughly one-fifth of volume processed through NEAR Intents, according to protocol data.
Unlike dedicated privacy chains, NEAR is attempting to integrate confidentiality directly into broader settlement infrastructure spanning multiple blockchains and stablecoin transfers.
Protocol upgrades reshape outlook
Investors are also positioning ahead of NEAR's planned network upgrade 2.13, expected in June, which introduces dynamic resharding and a post-quantum signing system.
The upgrade would allow the protocol to automatically add shards as network demand increases, removing the need for manual validator coordination. Developers behind the proposal said the system is designed to support up to 70 shards while maintaining near-linear scaling performance.
The changes are intended to support NEAR's longer-term push into AI-driven commerce and autonomous agents. The protocol has increasingly marketed itself as infrastructure for what co-founder Illia Polosukhin describes as an "agentic economy" in which software agents execute payments and transactions independently across multiple chains.
