NEAR’s Intents and AI Bets Fuel Revival

NEAR Protocol has been showing renewed momentum over the past several months, with the NEAR token up nearly 50% in the past 90 days. What's happening on the network that's boosting investor confidence?

The network's evolving technical upgrades are worth highlighting here. NEAR's technical innovations include Nightshade sharding, native account abstraction, separate blockchain and runtime layers, chain signatures for simple multichain account management, etc.

Upon these technical building blocks, the NEAR team has been building out and organizing its future around two central pillars: NEAR Intents and NEAR AI.

While the former aims at simplifying crosschain liquidity globally, the latter looks to service the bloom of AI agent commerce. Importantly, both of these arms are designed to capture value for the NEAR community via $NEAR buybacks.

NEAR Intents

The bigger story here currently is NEAR Intents, which is a streamlined multichain interoperability system.

Want to trade coins on incompatible chains, like ETH on Ethereum for BTC on Bitcoin? Intents make this possible without requiring you to bridge anything manually thanks to mechanisms like chain signatures (use your NEAR account to sign on other chains) and solvers (a network of third-party specialists that compete to fulfill requests).

What this model enables is chain abstraction. For users, one NEAR account makes it affordable, simple, and quick to move money across disparate networks. For app builders, they can readily integrate multiple chains with just the NEAR API so they don't get bogged down in manual development and users can simply access whichever chains they want.

For example, last fall I covered the Zashi app, a rising Zcash wallet that was gaining traction in no small part due to its support for crosschain swaps via NEAR Intents. I used it to move a small amount of ETH directly into shielded ZEC without having to go through a CEX, which was nice. That's just one app. Dozens of other projects, including Infinex, Kyber, Ledger, and LI.FI, have also integrated Intents.

The traction is readily apparent in the data. To date, NEAR Intents have processed over $18 billion worth of crosschain volume, and $5 billion of that activity has come since the end of February 2026. Per the red line in the graph below, cumulative volume is up and to the right, and with no signs of slowing down. And with crypto's ongoing privacy renaissance, the arrival of Confidential Intents has equipped NEAR to play a growing role in this new discretion paradigm, too.

NEAR AI

Beyond Intents, the other major pillar in the network's future-minded bets is NEAR AI, which aims to make the protocol a major infra layer for the agentic economy.

Of course, as AI agents increasingly become market participants, handling trades and treasury operations in their own right, they'll need to move value securely and verifiably. NEAR AI is being built accordingly, with the $NEAR-denominated suite already featuring resources like Cloud (private inference through TEEs), Agent Hosting (private virtual agents), Agent Market (Intents-powered exchange for agents), and the Confidential GPU Marketplace (private enterprise AI workloads).

While NEAR AI hasn't facilitated the major volumes that Intents has, the two pillars are deeply complementary. Intents let agents more easily move money across chains, and NEAR AI offers a secure environment to operate in. Together they have more potential than either would alone, and depending on how big agentic commerce gets in the years ahead, the AI layer's ceiling might ultimately be higher.

So when we talk about why NEAR is trending lately, I think traction around Intents and NEAR AI is the first things to pay attention to, teamed with how the L1's revamped tokenomics are now wiring revenues from that action back into $NEAR buybacks. Plus, on top of this flywheel the market is now seemingly pricing in the possibility that NEAR has built products with the potential for real staying power.