NEAR Jumps 30% as $36M Bitwise ETP Adds Weight to AI Token Thesis

NEAR Token Surges Past $2

NEAR, the token of the artificial intelligence-native protocol Near, surged connected Friday arsenic it crossed the $2 threshold for the archetypal clip this year. The spike saw the token support an upward inclination that began pursuing the announcement that Near AI had partnered with Bermuda to deploy AI-powered nationalist services.

According to the regular chart, NEAR jumped 30%, rising from $1.73 to an intraday precocious of $2.25, which pushed its play gains past the 40% mark. Since the commencement of May, erstwhile it traded astir $1.30, the token is up implicit 70%, making it 1 of the top-performing integer assets successful the period. The latest leap besides concisely lifted its marketplace capitalization past the $2.9 cardinal mark.

Market observers attribute NEAR’s upward trajectory to increasing designation of the protocol’s underlying AI architecture. Near Protocol’s deliberate alignment with AI agents, concatenation abstraction, and autonomous commerce represents a calculated play to found itself arsenic the default furniture for the next-generation integer economy. Institutional appetite appears to validate this trajectory, highlighted by $3 cardinal successful caller inflows into the European-based Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP. These inflows brought the plus nether absorption to $36 million.

Furthermore, the network’s upcoming dynamic resharding upgrade, slated for June, underscores its assertive committedness to agentic commerce. By allowing the blockchain to automatically standard and divided information loads successful existent time, this structural overhaul provides the earthy throughput indispensable to enactment millions of high-frequency AI agents executing autonomous transactions.

However, immoderate manufacture skeptics caution that the network’s bullish “coordination layer” thesis catastrophically miscalculates however marketplace worth is really captured. Critics reason that Near protocol has a past of shipping superior, highly scalable method architecture that yet sits unused due to the fact that it lacks distribution, developer mindshare, and endeavor integrations.

Opponents besides pass that features similar concatenation abstraction volition beryllium easy commoditized astatine the exertion furniture by monolithic incumbents similar Coinbase. Furthermore, due to the fact that aggravated solver contention inherently drives web execution fees down to near-zero, skeptics support that precocious transaction volumes volition yet go vanity metrics that neglect to sustainably offset token emissions.