NEAR Token Rallies 28% After Privacy, AI and Scaling Upgrades

NEAR’s native token climbed 28% in 24 hours and nearly 45% over the past week after the protocol rolled out a set of privacy, AI and scaling updates between May 20 and May 22. Traders moved capital into the token while Bitcoin slid from about $82,000 to $77,000 over the prior week.

On May 20-22, the NEAR ecosystem announced three product changes. Trezu launched Confidential Treasuries, a private on-chain multisig product for payroll, balance management and cross-chain payments across more than 35 chains. Trezu reported roughly $68 million in confidential transfers from near.com in the past month. The treasuries use NEAR’s private sharding and Intents infrastructure.

NEAR AI introduced automatic anonymization of personally identifiable information in prompts sent to closed models, including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Under the new system, sensitive data is stripped on the user’s device before it is transmitted to external models.

A network upgrade that includes automatic dynamic resharding is scheduled for June 2026 as part of upgrade 2.13. The resharding feature will allow shards to split automatically once they reach a set size, allowing the protocol to add capacity as demand increases. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin wrote on social media that the change would enable the network to scale to more than 70 shards and support higher throughput.

Market participants noted the announcements coincided with a rotation of liquidity away from Bitcoin into large-cap altcoins with AI and privacy use cases. Sammi Li, chief executive of crypto exchange Ju.com, called NEAR “one of the more obvious beneficiaries” of that rotation. Li also warned that rapid price gains can outpace on-chain fundamentals and that momentum may reflect narrative-driven trading and strength-chasing.

Users on a prediction market assign a 12% probability that a broad altcoin rally will begin by July; that estimate did not change through May. The NEAR updates focus on private finance features, AI-data handling and automated capacity expansion that supporters say aim to support on-chain AI agents and confidential transactions.