AI + Privacy + Buyback.

Written by: Mahe, Foresight News

On May 25th, the current price of the public chain NEAR token is $2.37. Since early May, NEAR has surged from a low of $1.24 to a high of $2.5, with its market capitalization returning to over $3 billion. Amid the fluctuations of mainstream cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, NEAR has shown independent performance, becoming one of the most prominent tokens besides ZEC, ONDO, and HYPE. What is the reason behind its surge?

AI Narrative

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, is already a seasoned expert in the AI field. Illia is one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper, with other authors including Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer, all from Google Brain/Google Research. This paper proposed the Transformer architecture, which is entirely based on the attention mechanism, greatly enhancing training efficiency and model scale. This is the origin of today's mainstream large model frameworks such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

NEAR has taken AI as its core strategy since its early days. In February of this year, NEAR officially launched the Near.com super application, which integrates cross-chain exchange, privacy tools, and smart contract management, and is equipped with AI capabilities to support autonomous agent application scenarios. In November 2023, Illia also officially took on the role of CEO of the NEAR Foundation, focusing primarily on the core narrative of AI.

In May, Nvidia's financial report drove the overall recovery of the AI sector, and NEAR was seen as a representative of decentralized AI infrastructure, alongside TAO.

On May 22nd, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes placed NEAR alongside HYPE and ZEC in an article, igniting market sentiment directly.

Privacy Public Chain

The blockchain has long faced the privacy dilemma of "transparency equals public." The surge of privacy coins like ZEC and XMR has led the industry to refocus on privacy tracks, with various protocols, including public chains, beginning to add privacy functions to their protocols.

NEAR was founded in 2018, initially focusing on scalability rather than AI. Its earliest progress was primarily optimized through sharding technology, making it one of the popular public chains that were known as "Ethereum killers" at that time.

As a result, NEAR's public offering on CoinList once caused the latter's website to crash. During the 2020-2021 bull market, NEAR soared from $0.5 to a peak of $20.59, becoming the most notable star token of that year.

However, as time progressed into this market cycle, the vast majority of old coins and new VC coins were rejected by the market, so even in this bull market cycle, NEAR only peaked at $9 in 2024 before declining, with its coin price hitting a low of $0.84 in 2026.

After the official launch of NEAR Intents, the demand for privacy began to become very important. Intents are the core of cross-chain transactions, allowing users to execute their intentions, but large transactions on public chains are prone to MEV (maximum extractable value) attacks, which are considerable obstacles for institutions, large holders, and ordinary DeFi users alike.

The NEAR team began to plan for 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 cross-chain transfer of assets such as ETH, BTC, SOL, and USDC across more than 35 chains. The sender, amount, and path are all hidden, with results displayed only on the target chain, using private sharding + TEE (trusted execution environment) for bridging.

NEAR also opened the privacy mode, automatically making user balance, transfers, and transactional activities private. Whether for ordinary users, corporate users, or AI agents executing complex strategies, there won’t be data leaks. The Confidential Treasuries (Trezu) launched around the same time further support privacy multi-signatures, payroll, and cross-chain payments, having processed a cumulative $68 million in confidential transactions.

Compared to pure privacy coins like Zcash, NEAR's balance between privacy, usability, and cross-chain functionality is more practical, directly addressing enterprise-level requirements and promoting the recovery of TVL (total value locked) and developer activity.

NEAR Intents Buyback

In October 2025, NEAR completed the last batch of the initial supply unlock, achieving a circulation rate close to 100%.

NEAR designed a dual mechanism of inflation + burn from the early days of its mainnet: with a maximum inflation of 5% per year (which was reduced to 2.5% through an upgrade in October 2025), of which 90% is given to validators as rewards, and 10% goes to the protocol treasury. Entering 2026, the project no longer has large unlock events or linear unlock events, leaving only daily epoch reward emissions (about 5.4 million NEAR were released in the last 30 days, accounting for 0.4% of the total supply).

In addition, the revenue from NEAR Intents transaction fees will directly buy back NEAR tokens in the market, which has also brought significant buying pressure.

The intents on the NEAR protocol drive the cross-chain transaction layer, allowing users to simply express the intended result (for example, converting BTC to SOL) and providing the best execution path, supporting multiple chains, without the need for bridging/wrapping assets, and low fees.

NEAR Intents previously had two parts of fees: the protocol fee and distribution fee (shared with third-party integrators), but now the protocol fee is entirely directed towards buybacks. The repurchased NEAR tokens are not necessarily burned immediately, but can be staked, locked, or have their liquidity removed, while still counting towards the total supply, reducing market pressure while also earning staking rewards.

According to the latest data from defiLlama, the TVL of NEAR Intents has exceeded $80 million, with its daily fee generation fluctuating around $100,000, resulting in a monthly buyback amount nearing $3 million.

By the end of this month, its core development team Near One will also announce the latest technological progress. By the end of the second quarter of 2026, the team plans to release dynamic reallocation, significantly enhancing scalability. Additionally, the team will introduce NEAR's post-quantum secure signature scheme and upgrade it in June of this year to improve its resistance to quantum computing.