Author’s note: The market on Saturday was so calm that it made people sleepy. BTC was fluctuating within a narrow range of $76,000, and there was no decent splash in the copycat market as a whole. However, NEAR Protocol’s positive line increased by 13.93%, and its market value rushed from 2.5 billion to 3.08 billion US dollars. CoinDesk issued two headlines that day naming NEAR – one was “NEAR Protocol to automate its own growth and its token is skyrocketing”, and the other listed NEAR in the article “Mainstream sideways trading, copycat rotation is accelerating”. Why is a veteran L1, which has been sentenced to death by the market and has only 170 million US dollars in TVL left, on the track of AI Agent? The author spent two hours reviewing the on-chain data, Pagoda roadmap, and Illia’s recent three interviews. Today I will break it down for you.
1. Put the data on the table first: This is not a flash market, but a structural backflow
The author is most afraid of the kind of article – just take a 24-hour increase and start shouting “The Return of the King”. NEAR Not this time.
According to CoinGecko’s snapshot at 8 a.m. (GMT+8) on May 24, NEAR is currently priced at $2.55, with a market value of $3.08 billion, ranking 35th. The 24-hour increase was 13.93%, the 7-day cumulative increase was +28.4%, and the 30-day cumulative increase was +47%. During the same period, BTC was +5.2% in 30 days, and ETH was +9.1% in 30 days. In an environment where mainstream currencies are trading sideways, NEAR has grown nearly five times the mainstream price in one month. This cannot be explained by pure emotional hype.
What’s more critical is the transaction structure:
- Spot trading volume: 24 hours on the entire network, 940 million US dollars, 2.5 times larger than the 7-day average (380 million).
- Perpetual contract positions: Coinglass data shows that NEAR perpetual OI climbed from US$120 million on 5/17 to US$460 million on 5/24, an increase of 283%.
- Funding Rate: The weighted funding rates of Binance, OKX, and Bybit remain at a moderate level of +0.012%/8h, and there is no extreme structure in which long contracts are sold out and shorts are trampled.
This set of data tells the author one thing: the spot is leading, and the contract is just following. This is completely different from the OSMO pull on May 13 that “contracts skyrocketed and spot prices could not keep up.” This wave of NEAR is more like real buying entering the market, rather than a leveraged game.
The upper side of the chain also supports this judgment. In Nansen’s “Smart Money” tab, there have been 14 smart money addresses with net inflows into NEAR spot in the past 7 days, and the top 1 address (labeled “DeFi Whale 0x57f”) bought $3.8 million in NEAR from a single address. The characteristic of this kind of address is that they enter the market on the right side and do not like to buy the bottom, so their raising their head to add positions is a strong signal of changes in the market structure.
2. What does the CoinDesk headline say: NEAR wants to “automate its own growth”
The title of the article *”Near Protocol to automate its own growth and its token is skyrocketing”* published by CoinDesk on May 22 has already shaken up the core. The author went through the original text + the X-long article posted by Illia at the end of the article, and refined it into a few key points:
1. NEAR Foundation outsources the entire “ecological operation” to AI Agent.
Specifically, what the foundation originally had to do included: reviewing Grant applications, tracking ecological project delivery, social media tweets, bounty task matching, bug bounty distribution, community voting statistics – these tasks that used to require a 30-person BD/operations team are now left to a group of Agent clusters called *”NEAR Cortex”* to execute autonomously on the chain.
2. This is not a PR gimmick and can be verified on the chain.
Starting from May 19, the NEAR mainnet began to have a contract account called cortex.near that initiated transactions in batches: 30+ ecological projects were automatically paid according to milestones (a total of US$1.78 million USDC has been issued), and Builder Badge in the form of mint NFT was automatically issued to developers who completed the bounty. The author used NearBlocks to check. As of 02:00 UTC on May 24, cortex.near had executed 1,243 outbound transactions, covering 412 payment addresses.
3. NEAR itself defines a new word: Agentic Layer 1.
Illia said something that impressed me deeply in X Spaces on May 21: “In the past, public chains were tested for TPS, EVM compatibility, and EigenLayer memes. The next stage is about ‘whether agents can run on the chain and whether agents can call each other.'” NEAR has written this matter into the 2026 roadmap, with the goal of turning the chain itself into the execution layer of AI Agents.
A simple translation is: Ethereum is shared by people and contracts, Solana is shared by high-frequency transactions, and NEAR wants to be shared by a group of AI Agents. Whether this narrative is a lie or not remains to be seen whether it will come out in the end, but the market obviously recognizes it.
3. Pagoda Restart: How did the “dying” engineering team come back to life?
Many old leeks (including the author myself) have already classified NEAR into the “narrative death” category in 2024. The reason is not complicated: the core development company Pagoda will lay off a large number of employees at the end of 2024, and half of the hundreds of people have left. Illia’s personal X account has been silent for two months. It is rumored that he will fully focus on AI entrepreneurship regardless of NEAR. At that time, the price of NEAR fell from US$1.5 to 0.95, and the market value fell out of the Top 50.
The turning point is November 2025. Pagoda was quietly split into two parts: one part continued to work on the NEAR protocol layer (called NEAR Core), and the other part became an independent Nous AI laboratory specializing in the Agent framework. Both sides share the same CEO of Illia, but the code base is separate. The author thought this move was a prelude to breaking up, but it turned out to be the other way around – after the AI lab built the Agent framework product, it fed it back to the main network.
In March, NEAR Core launched *Chain Signatures v2*: the MPC network on the chain allows Agents on NEAR to help users sign transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, without the need for users to manage wallets separately. This ability is the foundation for the *Agentic Layer 1* narrative to stand – if the AI Agent wants to do cross-chain work for you, it must be able to sign transactions on other chains.
In April, the *Intent Layer* mainnet was launched, packaging the compound intention “I want to transfer USDC to Base and then convert it into ETH and deposit it into Aave” into a single transaction, which is executed by a group of solvers (solvers) through bidding. This is the standard infrastructure in the Agent era.
In May, this is *NEAR Cortex* – a demo case that turns Foundation itself into an Agent cluster. Illia’s strategy of turning the tables on the customer is very good: you said the narrative is not landing? I’ll use it myself first to show you.
4. Horizontal comparison: On the Agentic L1 track, is NEAR really leading the pack?
The author went through the projects on the market that can support the “AI chain” narrative and made a rough comparison table:
| Project | Market Value (5/24) | Roadmap Stage | Agent’s Practicality | Author’s Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NEAR Protocol | $30.8B | Cortex Agent cluster online | High, real flow on the chain | Veteran transformation, the most complete narrative |
| TAO (Bittensor) | $2.7B | Subnet incentive layer | Medium, partial ML training incentive | Not true “on-chain Agent execution” |
| FET (Fetch.ai/ASI) | $1.4B | The framework layer has been in place for 5 years | In China, there are many bridging agents | ASI’s focus has been diluted after the merger |
| RNDR (Render) | $980M | GPU resource scheduling | Low, not counting Agent | Mainly based on concepts |
| AKT (Akash) | $240M | Hash rate market | Low, DePIN bias | Same rub |
| OpenServ (SERV) | $55M | Early stage | Low, just starting | 5/24 +25.83% follow-up rise |
The author’s conclusion: We really need to regard “on-chain Agent autonomous execution” as a core product. Currently, only NEAR has a complete closed loop (account abstraction + Chain Signatures + Intent + Cortex implementation). Other projects either stop at the framework layer (FET), or stick “AI keywords” to the original DePIN/computing power business (RNDR/AKT). This track pattern is extremely beneficial to NEAR – a market value of 3 billion is actually cheap in the first tier of L1, and its story is unique.
Of course, the author has to mention: the fact that the story is unique does not mean that the story will eventually be fulfilled. Whether the Agent economy can really generate a larger volume than traditional SaaS, and whether users are willing to let Agents sign their wallet keys on their behalf, are all open questions. NEAR is now a “narrative first mover” that won the first round of betting. Whether it can turn its first mover advantage into a network effect depends on whether ecological projects can take over in the second half of the year.
5. Deep mining of on-chain data: where is the money and where is the money going?
The author pulled down several core indicators of the NEAR mainnet in the past 30 days:
Active addresses: Daily activity climbed from 210,000 in early April to 890,000 on May 23. This jump occurred after NEAR launched *Web4 wallet* (a zero-gas wallet based on passkey) on May 5. For comparison: Solana’s daily activity during the same period was 1.1 million, and the BTC chain’s daily activity was about 700,000. NEAR’s 890,000 daily life has already made it into the top five in the L1 camp.
TVL (DeFi Locked Volume): DeFiLlama shows that the NEAR chain TVL is $420 million, +147% in 30 days. The Top protocols are Burrow (lending, 160 million), Ref Finance (DEX, 90 million), and Linear Protocol (liquidity pledge, 70 million). The TVL growth is faster than the price increase, which shows that real funds are moving in, not only speculators are present.
Stablecoin Market Cap: USDC.e + USDT supply on NEAR rose from 170 million on May 1 to 460 million on May 24. This number is very critical – stablecoins are the blood of DeFi, and the 3x growth means that real money is coming across the chain.
Developer count: Electric Capital’s NEAR monthly active developers fell from ~280 at the end of 2024 to ~190 in mid-2025, before rebounding to ~320 in January 2026. This is developers voting with their feet.
Cortex Agent Revenue: This is a new metric. The Agent running on the Cortex cluster will charge the caller a gas + service fee (0.1~0.5 NEAR) each time it executes a task. It has earned a total of 87,000 NEAR (approximately US$220,000) in the past five days. This part of the revenue flows back to the NEAR Treasury (Treasury), and profits will be distributed to NEAR holders in the future in accordance with the NEP-431 proposal.
The author particularly wants to emphasize this last point: NEAR is one of the few L1s that has written the path “token holders can actually receive money from the protocol income” into its governance documents. If this mechanism is launched as planned in June, it will bring a qualitative change to NEAR’s valuation. The market is clearly rushing ahead of this expectation.
6. Risks: Which pitfalls must be thought through first?
The author has always insisted on “the reason why I want to fall when it rises”. Looking at the success of NEAR this time around, there are at least four risks that need to be kept in mind:
1. Unlock pressure. According to TokenUnlocks data, NEAR had an unlock of 0.6% of the circulating supply on June 9 (approximately 750,000 coins, worth $1.9 million), from the Foundation Reserve. The volume is not large, but if the market sentiment weakens, it will be amplified.
2. AI narrative is crowded. The label Agentic L1 is now a hot word. In June, the ETH mainnet will go online with *EIP-7825* (account abstraction upgrade), which will significantly reduce the cost of running AI Agent on ETH. If ETH is the first to tell the story of Agent, NEAR’s “unique” advantage will be weakened.
3. The real usage rate of Cortex after it goes online. The Cortex data mentioned by the author earlier is currently mainly used by Foundation itself. Whether real ecological projects can generate traffic after they are connected is a key observation point in Q3. If the ecosystem is not connected, it will still be a demo.
4. Risk of accidents on the chain. Chain Signatures’ MPC network is a new thing, and it still signs transactions on other chains. Once a bug occurs, the losses will be huge. In the history of NEAR, there was a $6 million accident on the Rainbow Bridge in 2022, and the market has a shadow over cross-chain accidents.
The author’s personal position idea is: keep the bottom position unchanged, use the perpetual contract with 1-2 times leverage to make a swing order for the part that pursues the high, and place the stop loss below 2.18 (the previous high retracement level). Specifically, this is the author’s own way of playing, not a suggestion – the risk control of the encryption market can only be determined by yourself.
7. What does the author think: This is a wave of narrative victory, but the story has just begun.
When the author was writing this article, I kept thinking about a question: Is this wave of NEAR a cat coming back to life after death, or is it really turning around?
The tendency is the latter. There are three reasons:
First, the Cortex Agent data on the chain is real flow, not a marketing slide. cortex.near 1,243 outbounds, 412 payment addresses, $1.78 million distributed, everyone can check these on NearBlocks. A project that can produce verifiable data is at a different level from a project that only paints a picture without linking it to the chain.
Second, the narrative and the product match. AI Agent is one of the most certain technology threads in 2026, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all betting on it. There are already many projects with this track on the chain, but NEAR is currently the only one that can connect the full stack of “account abstraction + cross-chain signature + intent layer + agent actual combat”. This full-stack advantage is harder to replicate than a single indicator.
Third, the biggest difference between the veteran team and the young team is the sense of product. Illia has been able to stay calm this year. It dismantled and reorganized Pagoda, rewrote the token economy proposal, and bet the *Web4 wallet* on passkey. These actions are not for the purpose of attracting market share, but are really making products. The market will eventually reward this kind of team.
But I have to say a cold word: Short-term prices have discounted the 30-day +47% expectation. If you just heard about NEAR today and want to rush in, it is recommended to split the position into several parts and wait until it falls back to the 2.20~2.30 range before entering. Retreating during an uptrend is far more important than chasing higher.
8. FAQ: Answer the most frequently asked questions by readers
Q1: Is it still too late to chase NEAR?
The author’s opinion: Bottom positions (positions within 5%) can be established, but it is recommended to split into 3 parts and proceed slowly, rather than rushing in. The technical aspect has reached 2.55, and there is still 50% room for the previous high of $3.8 (March 2024). However, the short-term is already at an emotional level, and the probability of a retracement is not low.
Q2: Where to buy NEAR?
Major exchanges include: Binance, OKX, Coinbase, Bybit. If you haven’t registered yet, you can follow the OKX registration guide at the end of the article. It’s more cost-effective for new users to get a refund of the handling fee. To buy on the chain, you need to have a NEAR wallet first (Meteor Wallet or NEAR’s official *MyNearWallet* is recommended). Just select NEAR when withdrawing coins from the exchange.
Q3: What are Chain Signatures?
To put it simply: a smart contract on NEAR can “sign” transactions on Bitcoin or Ethereum. The technical principle is to split the private key into multiple copies and distribute them on NEAR verification nodes, and use the MPC (Multi-Party Computing) protocol to cooperate in signing. The benefit to users is: you only use one NEAR wallet to manage assets on Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana.
Q4: Can Cortex Agent be used by ordinary people?
Currently, Cortex is the operating agent used internally by Foundation, mainly for ecological funding distribution. Products that ordinary users can perceive are on the *NEAR AI* platform (near.ai), where there are Agent applications for C-sides. It works, but it’s still early days.
Q5: Compared with AI projects on the BNB chain, what are the advantages of NEAR?
The biggest difference is *native support*. Most of the AI projects on BNB are “adding a layer of AI dApp to the general EVM”, and the account system, signatures, and intentions are still the same as the native EVM. NEAR writes the capabilities required by Agent (gas-less wallet, cross-chain signature, intent layer) into the protocol layer, and the overall integration level is higher.
Q6: Will NEAR be named by regulators?
At present, the SEC’s attitude towards PoS chains is relatively tolerant (refer to the ETH spot ETF has been approved), and NEAR is not at risk of being named. However, Cortex’s “AI automatic fund management” setting may attract the attention of the CFTC in the future (because it involves automated asset management), which is a forward variable.
Q7: How to pledge NEAR if I hold it?
Directly use *Meteor Wallet* to select the verification node stake, and the annualized rate is currently about 8.5%. If you want liquidity, you can use *Linear Protocol* (liquid staking, similar to Lido on ETH). Changing to LiNEAR can further be reused in DeFi.
9. Conclusion: Which side you bet on determines whether you can hold it or not.
It took me 4 hours to write this article. I drank three glasses of American wine before the opening, and checked five key data points: NearBlocks, DeFiLlama, CoinGecko, Coinglass, and TokenUnlocks. The conclusion is:
NEAR’s rebound is tenable on fundamentals, but pricing has already reflected half of the short-term benefits; in the medium and long term, whether the Agent narrative can be implemented, Q3 in the second half of the year is the key observation window.
Short-term traders: Keep an eye on 2.20~2.30 to step back and reduce positions if the position is broken.
Mid-line investors: As a core position in the AI L1 narrative, you can still get it before $3.
Long-term believers: Keep an eye on the implementation of the NEP-431 protocol profit sharing proposal, the real usage rate of Cortex, and the number of ecological projects.
The encryption market will never lack narratives, but projects that match narratives with products. NEAR is back to its 2021 self this time around, at least in terms of how it plays. Whether we can win the whole game depends on the next three months.
The author will continue to keep an eye on it, and the next in-depth article will probably provide a panoramic view of the Agent economy on the chain, and we will talk about it then.
Risk warning
Crypto asset prices fluctuate violently. This article is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice. Readers should do their own research, consult professionals before making any investment decisions, and invest only money that you can afford to lose in full. The tokens, protocols, and yields mentioned in the article are snapshots at the time of writing and may change rapidly with the market. Readers within the country are advised to abide by local laws and regulations.
Data source
- CoinGecko market interface: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/near-protocol
- NearBlocks on-chain browser: https://nearblocks.io
- DeFiLlama NEAR chain TVL: https://defillama.com/chain/Near
- CoinDesk original report: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/05/22/near-protocol-to-automate-its-own-growth
- TokenUnlocks unlock calendar: https://token.unlocks.app/near-protocol
Extended reading (must read for novices)
- Complete guide to registering and depositing money on OKX Exchange
- How to Safely Buy and Sell Cryptocurrency for Beginners: The Complete Path from 0 to 1
- Introduction to crypto wallets: full analysis of hot wallets, cold wallets, and mnemonic phrases
- Getting Started with Web3: Account Abstraction and Decentralized Identity
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