NEAR Rallies on Hayes Endorsement and AI Push

Hayes Endorsement Adds a Retail Spark

Arthur Hayes, described as a prominent crypto investor and former CEO of BitMEX, became the most visible catalyst after calling NEAR, HYPE and ZEC the “holy trinity” of altcoins. The endorsement helped pull attention toward NEAR, but the move was not framed as a single-catalyst rally.

Vadim Zacodil, described as a former contributor to the NEAR protocol who appears to operate a NEAR staking pool, said Bitwise had recently reported “significant inflows” into its NEAR exchange-traded product. Zacodil also pointed to NEAR’s buyback mechanisms and NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin’s artificial intelligence background as additional factors supporting the token’s market interest.

NEAR’s rally came as Bitcoin weakened from near $82,000 to $77,000 over the past week. Sammi Li, CEO of crypto exchange Ju.com, said part of NEAR’s move reflected capital rotation after months in which Bitcoin absorbed most available liquidity. Li said NEAR had become “one of the more obvious beneficiaries” as money rotated into large-cap altcoins.

Li also said NEAR’s long-running AI positioning made it a natural candidate for traders seeking AI-related crypto exposure. That helped NEAR stand apart from broader altcoin moves, with the rally tied to confidential on-chain treasuries, AI prompt privacy and automatic network scaling.

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Privacy and AI Tools Strengthen the Narrative

Between May 20 and May 22, NEAR rolled out or promoted privacy, AI and scalability announcements that reinforced the market narrative around the token. Trezu launched Confidential Treasuries, a product offering private on-chain multisig, payroll, balance management and cross-chain payments across more than 35 chains.

Confidential Treasuries is powered by NEAR’s private sharding and Intents infrastructure. NEAR’s official account said $68 million had moved confidentially out of near.com over the prior month, giving the privacy push a concrete usage figure.

NEAR AI also rolled out automatic PII anonymization for prompts sent to closed models, including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Under the system, sensitive data reportedly never leaves the user’s machine, addressing enterprise concerns around AI inference costs and data leakage.

Illia Polosukhin tied the upgrades to the coming “agentic market,” where specialized AI agents compete on outcomes through 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 said.

Polosukhin added: “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.”

Polosukhin also said: “Confidential inference means you have end-to-end encryption with nobody else getting access to your prompts. But this only works on open weight models (for now).” He said users who still want to use closed-weight models can use them through NEAR AI, which will remove sensitive information before prompts are sent out.

June Upgrade Puts Scaling in Focus

NEAR’s dynamic resharding upgrade is scheduled for June 2026 as part of network upgrade 2.13. The upgrade allows shards to split automatically once a shard reaches a certain state size, which is meant to expand network capacity as usage grows.

NEAR has increasingly positioned itself around privacy and confidential transactions, an area Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly described as one of blockchain’s biggest unresolved challenges. Despite the AI-heavy messaging, NEAR remains a Layer 1 blockchain competing with networks such as Ethereum and Solana, with a core goal of making decentralized applications faster and easier to use.

BitMEX Research Analyst Shang Wu said earlier this month: “NEAR trades around 56x annualised fees. That is cheaper than major L1 peers and much cheaper than LayerZero (ZRO) on a bridge-fee comparison.”

Wu added: “Long NEAR if we see new AI features, growing fees and updated revenue capture mechanism keep confirming the story.”

Market caution remained visible despite the rally. Li warned that token prices can move “much faster than fundamentals” once momentum builds, describing part of NEAR’s rally as narrative-driven and part as traders chasing strength. Li still said persistent caution while the market improves is “usually not a bad sign.”

Prediction-market users assigned only a 12% chance to a broader altseason starting by July, even after sharp standalone rallies in altcoins such as HYPE, Ondo and Zcash. That probability reportedly stayed unchanged in May, while the Fear & Greed Index remained “fearful.”

Li said she does not expect all altcoins to rally together, arguing that capital will likely stay concentrated in projects with strong narratives and real ecosystems. She described the current market as “much more selective than previous cycles” and said that if Bitcoin holds steady, quality altcoins could outperform over the next few months. Such a move, she said, “often starts when people are still skeptical.”

NEAR also outpaced other AI-adjacent tokens during the same period. Worldcoin gained 12%, while Venice Token rose 8%, reinforcing NEAR’s position as the leading mover among the tokens cited in the rally.