Price of NEAR Doubles in Just Half a Month, What's Behind Near Protocol's Surge?

Alongside Solana (SOL), another coin making significant strides is Near Protocol (NEAR). The token price of this Layer-1 project has doubled in just the past half month.

Price of NEAR Doubles in Just Half a Month, What's Behind Near Protocol's Surge?

While the cryptocurrency market is in a hot growth phase, triggered by SEC's green light for Bitcoin spot ETFs, altcoins are also experiencing strong surges, with each coin's strength depending on its project fundamentals.

Most prominently, Solana (SOL) has made an impressive comeback in 2023, maintaining continuous upward momentum throughout the first three months of 2024.

However, the Layer-1 sector isn't solely dominated by Solana. Toncoin (TON) recently saw a 60% increase when Telegram disclosed its IPO intentions. Another L1 coin less highlighted this "season" is NEAR.

According to data from CoinGecko, NEAR has surged nearly 160% over the past 30 days, and over 100% in the last 14 days. To put it more precisely, if one had purchased NEAR on February 29 at $3.8, their investment would have doubled by today!

Currently, NEAR is trading around $8, slightly retracing after recently hitting a temporary peak of $8.5.

1D chart of NEAR/USDT pair on Binance at 02:25 PM on 13/03/2024

Certainly, the overall market's upward trajectory is a major factor boosting NEAR. But beyond that, this Layer-1 project presents a rather intriguing case.

Upon closer examination, it's evident that capital flows are driving prices according to specific narratives. AI coins like FET, WLD, PHB... DeFi coins such as UNI, SUSHI, DYDX... benefit from proposals like Uniswap's fee-sharing, while meme coins like PEPE, DOGE, SHIB, WIF...

So where does NEAR fit into these narratives? Is it a Layer-1 narrative? Clearly, it is. But NEAR encompasses more keywords:

• Co-founder Illia Polosukhin's participation in the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) has significantly boosted AI tokens, including NEAR.

In a recent blog post discussing the intersection of blockchain and AI technology, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin used NEAR's AI approach as an example.

• As Zero-Knowledge (ZK) gains traction, NEAR integrates Wormhole and uses zk for cross-chain transactions. Hence, NEAR enters the "ZK" narrative.
• With the emergence of Data Availability, the Near Foundation introduced its NEAR DA solution. Thus, NEAR fits into the "Data Availability" narrative.

In summary, calling Near Protocol a Layer-1 project alone isn't sufficient, as its vision is to build an all-encompassing platform.

Additionally, the project recently celebrated reaching 100 million accounts created since mainnet launch.