Author: Jae, PANews
On September 21, Bitcoin briefly surpassed $84,000, leading to a wave of increases in the crypto market. Among them, NEAR's performance was particularly noteworthy. As of now, NEAR has broken through $4.20, rising over 20% in the past 24 hours.
At the same time, the total TVL of the Near network has climbed to $256 million, setting a new historical high. In just one week, two major product advancements from the Near protocol, the milestone incentive mechanism and the launch of privacy perpetual contracts, have been successively realized. Coupled with the market sentiment resonance in the privacy track, these developments have collectively propelled this wave of market activity.
TVL Hits Historical High, Incentive Mechanism + Privacy Derivatives Become Growth Drivers
The primary reason for NEAR generating excess returns lies in the two driving factors that have been continuously implemented.
Milestone Snapshot Triggered, Incentive Mechanism Ties TVL Growth to Token Price
The main catalyst driving a quick influx of funds was the first snapshot of the “NEAR@3.33” milestone incentive plan.
On September 17, Near announced that the total TVL of its Confidential Intents protocol exceeded the $70 million threshold, and it has now approached $98 million, officially activating the long-anticipated milestone incentive.
According to the rules, the official will allocate 333,333 milestone tokens to addresses maintaining a balance of privacy assets above $100 on near.com and completing at least one cross-chain privacy exchange, while setting a maximum allocation cap of 2% for a single wallet to avoid liquidity monopolization by whales.
The innovation of this mechanism lies in its market competition design: unlike the traditional airdrop model of “grab it and dump it,” the milestone tokens obtained by users will initially be locked. Whether they can be converted into tradable spot chips at a 1:1 ratio depends on whether the weighted average price of NEAR tokens over three days remains consistently stable at $3.33 or above.
In other words, for users to truly receive tradable airdrop incentives, they must align with the ecosystem, jointly promote TVL growth, and maintain the token price at the critical level. Essentially, “NEAR@3.33” is similar to a “call option with a strike price of $3.33.”
In the short term, the effects of “NEAR@3.33” have been quite noticeable. According to data from DeFiLlama, since September 17, the new influx of funds into the Near protocol has approached $65 million, entering a peak period of capital inflow.
“Default Privacy” Derivatives Launched, Integrated Hyperliquid Liquidity
The milestone incentive has been the trigger for short-term sentiment, while the launch of privacy perpetual contracts serves as a deeper structural support for this wave of market activity.
On September 18, near.com officially launched the “default privacy” (Confidential by Default) derivative trading feature, with the underlying clearing engine connecting to Perp DEX leader Hyperliquid. This product addresses a longstanding pain point in on-chain derivative trading: the publicly transparent order book exposes whales and institutions’ positions, entry points, and stop-loss strategies to the public ledger, making them vulnerable to MEV attacks and front-running.
NEAR's solution is to use dedicated privacy shards and trusted execution environment (TEE)-based cross-chain bridging technology to decouple the trading accounts from their underlying order book position information, shielding sensitive data such as sources of funds and account information from external observers.
More critically, NEAR has not spent massive amounts to create liquidity from scratch but has instead tapped into Hyperliquid's vast order book, which sees monthly trading volumes exceeding $240 billion, and over 50 mainstream perpetual contract markets supporting up to 40x leverage. With the multi-chain routing capabilities of NEAR Intents, traders can use assets located on different heterogeneous chains as initial margin, with the system automatically settling as USDC margin in the background.
This model also reshapes Near's revenue structure: near.com’s front end will continuously capture trading service fees through Hyperliquid’s Builder Code, transforming Near into a self-sustainable “full-chain derivatives gateway.”
In fact, this is yet another application scenario extending Near’s “chain abstraction” route: users do not need to interface with cross-chain bridges, different chain gas, or asset conversions; as long as they express trading goals through Intents, the underlying infrastructure will automatically complete cross-chain execution and settlement. According to official disclosure, the cumulative transaction volume of NEAR Intents has reached $29.8 billion, covering more than 35 public chains.
Farming Participants + Privacy Rotation, NEAR Raises with “Borrowed” Money
Amidst the market frenzy, attention to risks and boundaries is also necessary. This price increase is supported by product launches, but also fueled by sentiment and speculation.
1. Risk of Withdrawal by “Farming Participants”
The $70 million in funds that flowed into Confidential Intents may contain a large amount of speculative funds aimed at profiting from milestone airdrops. Once the snapshot is completed, the VWAP conditions are met, and tokens are unlocked, participants may quickly take profits, causing a simultaneous decline in TVL and token price.
2. Limited Value Capture Scale
NEAR’s official revenue dashboard shows that in the past 30 days, NEAR's total revenue has been approximately $5.24 million, with a net revenue of around $1.82 million. Although some of the net revenue generated from Intents will be used to buy back NEAR, token issuance is still ongoing, and the gap between the buyback rate and inflation rate continues to widen, limiting the counterbalancing effects of the buybacks.
Additionally, Near's current revenue scale accounts for less than 1% of the total market value, which is also insufficient to support sustained increases in token price.
3. Theme Rotation of Privacy Narrative
NEAR's rise is also highly correlated with the privacy theme driven by ZEC.
Zcash's on-chain wallet Zodl is using Near Intents for ZEC's privacy exchanges to reduce friction. It can be said that Near serves as the infrastructure in ZEC's usage path. On the other hand, Grayscale’s research on ZEC has pointed out that the “privacy” theme has yet to be fully priced.
This creates a logical chain: ZEC rises → market reassesses the “privacy” theme → rotation of “privacy” assets → Near is Zcash's infrastructure + hits the sentiment window → NEAR price increases.
If this judgment is valid, then a portion of the recent inflows into NEAR may also belong to theme rotation funds.
However, NEAR's Confidential Intents is merely a set of privacy trading infrastructure, not a purely privacy coin. Once the privacy narrative cools down and market risk preferences decline, some of the premiums recently gained by NEAR may face retraction.
Moreover, the entire crypto market has been in an expansion cycle over the past 30 days. In comparison, Ethereum's TVL grew by over $5.7 billion, Solana's TVL grew by over $900 million, and Base's TVL grew by about $700 million. Although Near's TVL growth rate is as high as 63%, far exceeding the previous three, the actual growth scale’s absolute value is only $165 million, still significantly lagging behind major public chains.
In short, Near's TVL growth is also benefiting from a collective shift in market risk preferences, rather than being an isolated event.
Beneath NEAR's recent surge are the combined effects of innovative incentive mechanisms, product launch realizations, and resonating sentiment in the track, all working together.
The “option-style airdrop” binds user interests and ecosystem growth together, avoiding the one-time sell-off pressures common in traditional airdrops; the privacy perpetual contracts leverage the underlying capabilities of chain abstraction and target high-value derivative tracks, stepping onto a lightweight path of “integrating into leading ecosystems.”
However, the significance of sentiment and speculation in the short-term market movement also cannot be ignored. The flow of funds post-airdrop unlocking, whether product launches can further increase revenue, and how long the privacy theme can remain in vogue will be crucial in determining whether this price increase is a short-term pulse or a long-term turning point.
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