NEAR coin price hits a new high since March 2025.

Written by: Ma He, Foresight News

On September 18, data from Bitget shows that NEAR surged past $3.5, with a 24-hour increase of over 30%, reaching a new high since March 2025, with its market cap climbing back to around $4.5 billion.

The direct catalyst is not a slogan, but rather the product data that was finalized three days ago: Confidential Intents TVL has crossed $70 million, and the first snapshot of NEAR@3.33 has been captured.

On September 15, NEAR's official announcement stated that its Confidential TVL reached $70 million and the milestone incentive snapshot has been completed.

Confidential trading TVL spikes, coin price secures 3.33 USD to redeem airdrop

On June 11, the NEAR official blog specified: Drop 1 will distribute 333,333 milestone tokens; the triggering condition is that the total Confidential Intents TVL reaches $70 million; eligible accounts must maintain a confidential balance of over $100 and complete at least one confidential exchange; the limit per wallet is 2% of the reward pool. Tokens received will be locked and cannot be sold or transferred, only when the volume-weighted average price of NEAR sustains above $3.33 for three consecutive trading days can they be redeemed 1:1 for circulating NEAR.

Progress has been publicly reported, not a sudden achievement. On August 22, it was reported that confidential TVL surpassed $35 million, and by August 31, it exceeded $50 million. After breaking through the threshold, the circulating supply did not immediately provide additional liquidable tokens—relative to about 1.307 billion in circulation, 333,000 is merely a signal, not a supply-demand inversion. The spot price has touched $3.33, but whether the three-day VWAP can hold remains unfulfilled.

According to the latest data from Dune, the total TVL of Intents is approximately $169 million, of which confidential trading has risen to over $72 million, while public trading is about $100 million. The data for confidential TVL has shown a direct increase since May this year.

DefiLlama's latest data shows that the NEAR protocol currently has a total TVL of $217.66 million, with fee revenue of about $5.27 million over the past 30 days. It is worth mentioning that, amidst many crypto protocols experiencing unstable or no income, NEAR's daily fee revenue has remained stable and even significantly increased.

In February this year, after NEAR opened its fee mechanism, the protocol's fee purpose was to repurchase NEAR in the open market, with 100% of the frontend fees going back to repurchase. Currently, according to NEAR’s official data, its captured protocol fees have risen to $46.36 million.

Privacy + AI dual benefits

During the same period, privacy assets like ZEC have also been rising, with ZEC briefly climbing past $1,500. The market tends to group NEAR into the same basket. On the product level, NEAR offers confidential execution for cross-chain settlements: transactions enter private shards, reducing exposure in the memory pool, front-running, and strategy leaks, without incurring the heavy costs of zero-knowledge proofs, covering more than 30 interconnected chains. NEAR does not necessarily need to win over the privacy coin's faith holders but can charge on entry and exit routing. This is similar to perpetual contracts taking transaction fees and bridge protocols capturing cross-chain traffic, with the difference being that privacy is made a default switch.

David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, stated that NEAR can be seen as a generalized version of ZEC: ZEC primarily provides privacy protection for funds, while NEAR aims to offer privacy protection for business activities.

He pointed out that the ZEC in privacy pools does not allow users to keep other aspects of their lives private, while NEAR can be applied to privacy scenarios beyond funds.

During the global semiconductor stock craze in July this year, some crypto tokens were also present. NEAR-USDT showed a high correlation with the AI-themed market, whether the market was bullish or bearish, both movements were quite synchronized. This synchronization was revalidated with the recent rebound in AI stocks.

NEAR emphasizes the narrative of "AI + blockchain," focusing on the layout of AI intelligences and data infrastructure. As a result, its price movements are often driven by market sentiment related to AI narratives. Today, semiconductor stocks such as U.S. stocks and A-shares surged significantly, boosting the price performance of AI-related tokens.

As the crypto market further integrates with traditional finance, traders also have an increasing number of tools available to layout macro themes that dominate the market.