NEAR Protocol Coming after our contract and holder checks finish for this coin. See the Scorecard for every call so far.
What it is
NEAR is a proof-of-stake blockchain designed to handle many transactions cheaply by splitting work across multiple shards that run in parallel, a design the project calls Nightshade. It aims to be easy to use, with human-readable account names instead of long strings of characters, and it has positioned itself in recent years around AI and cross-chain trading.
One of its main products is NEAR Intents. Instead of manually bridging and swapping across chains, a user states the result they want, and competing solvers fill the order. Cumulative Intents volume has been reported above $30 billion across dozens of chains.
NEAR launched with 1 billion tokens and has grown through staking rewards to roughly 1.3 billion. NEAR is used to pay fees, to stake with validators, and for governance through a system called House of Stake, where locked tokens become veNEAR voting power. A share of transaction fees is burned. In late 2025 the network adopted a change that cut maximum yearly inflation from 5% to 2.5%. Work on the protocol is supported by the NEAR Foundation and the engineering group Near One.
What can go wrong
- NEAR has no hard supply cap; new tokens are still issued every year, so holders who do not stake are diluted.
- Much of the current story rests on NEAR Intents and AI; if those products lose volume, the token's main use case narrows.
- Intents rely on outside solvers and cross-chain plumbing, which add counterparty and bridge risks beyond the base chain.
- Governance through House of Stake is new, and token-holder votes can still change economic settings such as rewards and treasury spending.
Check whether you are holding NEAR on the NEAR chain itself or a wrapped version on another network; the bridged copies carry extra risk and do not earn native staking rewards.
Safety checks
- Track recordGoodTrading since 2020, about 6 years. It has been through at least one full market cycle.
- Trading activityGood$991.7 million traded in the last 24 hours, 16% of its market value. That's enough activity that a normal-size order shouldn't move the price.
- Coins still to comeGood1.31 billion of 1.31 billion total coins are in circulation, so about 0% or less are still to be released. Little new supply is left to hit the market. There is no fixed maximum, so new coins can keep being created.
- Distance from its peakCautionDown 76% from its all-time high of $20.44 in January 2022. Many buyers from the peak are still underwater, and they often sell into any rally.
- Past yearFor context+117% over the past year, against −25.3% for bitcoin. It has held up better than bitcoin.
History of trouble and big events
- Oct 2025: Network upgrade 2.9.0 halved maximum yearly inflation from 5% to 2.5% after validators adopted it.
Holding a token on a smaller network, or got sent one you don't recognize? Run its address through the free checker. Copycat tokens often borrow big names.