In brief
NEAR rose 28% in 24 hours and almost 45% over the past week, leading altcoin gains.
The rally follows three protocol upgrades: confidential treasuries, AI prompt privacy, and automatic network scaling.
Myriad users see just a 12% chance of an “altseason” by July, with fearful sentiment persisting despite recent altcoin surges
NEAR Protocol’s token surged 28% to lead altcoin gains over the past 24 hours, extending its weekly rally to just under 45% as the team rolled out a cluster of privacy, AI, and scalability announcements between May 20 and May 22.The token's jump outpaces gains from Worldcoin's 12% and Venice Token's 8% over the same period, according to CoinGecko data. The moves come even as Bitcoin retraced from near $82,000 to $77,000 over the past week.The sharp price move is partly attributable to capital rotation after months of Bitcoin absorbing most available liquidity, according to Sammi Li, CEO of crypto exchange Ju.com. NEAR has become "one of the more obvious beneficiaries" as money moves into large-cap alts, Li told Decrypt, adding that the project's longstanding positioning around AI makes it a natural candidate when the market seeks AI-related exposure.Three NEAR Protocol upgradesThe rally reflects a concentrated product push across three fronts: confidential on-chain treasuries, AI prompt privacy, and automatic network scaling—positioning NEAR as a potential settlement layer for AI agents and confidential finance.On Wednesday, Trezu launched Confidential Treasuries, a product offering private on-chain multisig, payroll, balance management, and cross-chain payments across more than 35 chains. The product is powered by NEAR's private sharding and Intents infrastructure. NEAR's official account noted that $68 million moved confidentially out of near.com over the past month.Separately, NEAR AI rolled out automatic PII anonymization for prompts sent to closed models, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Sensitive data never leaves the user's machine under the new system, addressing enterprise concerns about AI inference costs and data leakage.NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin has been actively promoting the upgrades on social media, tying the developments directly to what he calls the coming "agentic market" where specialized AI agents compete on outcomes via intents."Dynamic resharding is coming soon to NEAR Protocol – unlocking a new level of scalability to power the growth of NEAR Intents and agentic commerce," Polosukhin tweeted Thursday. "As more AI agents transact onchain, we'll need more scalable infrastructure. This upgrade allows NEAR to scale to 70+ shards, which would have a higher throughput than Visa."
