NEAR is insanely strong—what it’s accomplished in the past month is more than what many blockchains achieve in a year. 1. NEAR Intents has surpassed $30 billion in cumulative cross-chain transaction volume, covering over 35 blockchains. What it’s doing now is super simple: if you want to swap from Solana to Base, or exchange USDC for assets on another chain, you don’t need to figure out bridges, gas fees, or transaction paths. Just tell it the result you want, and it handles everything for you in the background. http://(near.com) is integrating entry points for cross-chain transactions, Hyperliquid perpetual contracts, Ondo tokenized stocks, and more. In the future, users might not even care which chain they’re on—they’ll just care about completing their transactions. 2. NEAR is getting serious about capturing value for its token. In February, Intents launched a fee buyback mechanism, and on October 7, they officially submitted a proposal to reduce issuance. The plan is to lower the maximum annual issuance rate from 2.5% to 1.6% over 24 months. Previously, it had already dropped from 5% to 2.5%. If the new proposal passes, the model estimates that around 66 million fewer NEAR tokens will be issued over the next six years. That said, the current buyback scale is still far from covering the new issuance. 3. On September 29, Bitwise’s NEAR Spot ETF (NRR) officially launched on the NYSE, and institutions are planning to stake the NEAR held by the fund. On the tech side, NEAR has made progress too. It now supports ML-DSA post-quantum transaction signatures and dynamic sharding on its mainnet. The former allows accounts to opt for quantum-resistant signatures, while the latter enables the network to automatically adjust capacity based on demand. Combined with the privacy transaction capabilities of Confidential Intents, NEAR is piecing together the missing parts of the cross-chain financial infrastructure puzzle.