AI + Privacy + Buyback.
Written by: Mahe, Foresight News
On May 25th, the NEAR token was priced at $2.37. Since the beginning of May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.50, with its market capitalization returning to above $3 billion. Amidst the volatility of mainstream crypto assets like Bitcoin, NEAR has bucked the trend, becoming one of the best-performing tokens besides ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What are the reasons behind this surge?
AI Narrative
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin is a seasoned expert in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, along with Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, and others from Google Brain/Google Research. This paper proposed the Transformer architecture, entirely based on attention mechanisms, which significantly improved parallel training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of all mainstream large-scale model frameworks today, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
NEAR has made AI a core strategy from its early stages. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super app, integrating cross-chain exchange, privacy tools, and smart contract management, and incorporating built-in AI capabilities to support autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia also officially became the CEO of the NEAR Foundation, primarily focusing on the core AI narrative.
In May, Nvidia's financial report led to an overall recovery in the AI sector, with NEAR being regarded as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside TAO and others.
On May 22, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes shill NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC in an article, which immediately ignited market sentiment.
Privacy public blockchain
The blockchain has long faced the privacy dilemma of "transparency equals openness." The surge in the prices of privacy coins such as ZEC and XMR has led the industry to refocus on the privacy track, and various protocols, including public chains, have begun to add privacy features to their protocols.
Founded in 2018, NEAR initially focused on scalability rather than AI. Its early developments primarily revolved around continuous optimization of sharding technology, making it one of the most popular public chains at the time, touted as an "Ethereum killer."
This is why NEAR's public offering on CoinList once caused the latter's website to crash. During the bull market cycle of 2020-2021, NEAR soared from $0.5 to a high of $20.59, becoming the most watched star token of that year.
However, as time fast forward to this cycle, the vast majority of old coins and new VC coins were rejected by the market. Therefore, even in this bull market cycle, NEAR only reached a high of $9 in 2024, and then declined all the way down, with its price falling to a low of $0.84 in 2026.
With the official launch of NEAR Intents, privacy requirements have become extremely important. Intents are the core of cross-chain transactions, allowing users to execute transactions simply by expressing their intentions. However, large transactions on public chains are vulnerable to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) attacks, a significant obstacle for institutions, large investors, and ordinary DeFi users alike.
The NEAR team began planning privacy as an important complement to Intents. In late May of this year, the NEAR Intents team launched the Confidential Payments and Confidential Intents features, supporting privacy-preserving cross-chain transfers of assets such as ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across 35+ chains. The sender, amount, and path are all hidden, with the result only displayed on the target chain. The underlying layer uses private sharding + TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) bridging.
NEAR also offers a privacy mode, where user balances, transfers, and transactions are kept private by default, preventing data leaks whether ordinary users, enterprise users, or AI agents execute complex strategies. Confidential Treasuries (Trezu), launched around the same time, further supports privacy-focused multi-signature, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having already processed $68 million in confidential transactions.
Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR offers a more practical balance between privacy and usability, as well as cross-chain functionality. It also directly addresses enterprise-level needs, driving a resurgence in TVL and developer activity.
NEAR Intents Fee Buyback
In October 2025, NEAR completed the unlocking of the final batch of initial supply, with circulation rate approaching 100%.
NEAR was designed with a dual mechanism of inflation and burning from the early days of the mainnet: a maximum annual inflation of 5% (which was permanently halved to 2.5% in October 2025 through an upgrade), with 90% rewarding validators and 10% going into the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project has no more large-scale or linear unlocking events, only daily epoch reward releases (approximately 5.4 million NEAR have been released in the last 30 days, representing 0.4% of the total supply).
In addition, NEAR Intents transaction fees are used to directly buy back NEAR tokens in the market, which has also brought in considerable buying interest.
The NEAR protocol's intent-driven cross-chain transaction layer allows users to simply express their desired outcome (e.g., exchanging BTC for SOL), and it will provide the optimal execution path. It supports multiple chains, requires no bridging/packaging assets, and has low fees.
Previously, NEAR Intents had two types of fees: protocol fees and distribution fees (shared with third-party integrators). However, protocol fees are now entirely processed through buybacks. The NEAR that is bought back is not necessarily burned immediately. Instead, it is staked, locked, or removed from liquidity after being bought back, but it is still counted in the total supply, reducing circulating supply pressure and earning staking rewards.
According to the latest data from defiLlama, NEAR Intents' TVL has exceeded $80 million, with daily expenses fluctuating around $100,000, which translates to monthly buyback amounts of around $3 million.
At the end of this month, its core development team, Near One, also announced the latest technical progress. By the end of the second quarter of 2026, the team will release dynamic re-division, which will greatly improve scalability. In addition, the team will also introduce and upgrade NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme in June this year to improve its resistance to quantum computing.
