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

The $NEAR token jumped 30% to an intraday high of $2.25, marking a 70% increase since the start of May and briefly pushing its market capitalization past $2.9 billion.

$NEAR Token Surges Past $2

$NEAR, the token of the artificial intelligence-native protocol Near, surged on Friday as it crossed the $2 threshold for the first time this year. The spike saw the token maintain an upward trend that began following the announcement that Near AI had partnered with Bermuda to deploy AI-powered public services.

According to the daily chart, $NEAR jumped 30%, rising from $1.73 to an intraday high of $2.25, which pushed its weekly gains past the 40% mark. Since the start of May, when it traded around $1.30, the token is up over 70%, making it one of the top-performing digital assets in the period. The latest jump also briefly lifted its market capitalization past the $2.9 billion mark.

Market observers attribute $NEAR’s upward trajectory to growing recognition of the protocol’s underlying AI architecture. Near Protocol’s deliberate alignment with AI agents, chain abstraction, and autonomous commerce represents a calculated play to establish itself as the default layer for the next-generation digital economy. Institutional appetite appears to validate this trajectory, highlighted by $3 million in recent inflows into the European-based Bitwise $NEAR Staking ETP. These inflows brought the asset under management to $36 million.

Furthermore, the network’s upcoming dynamic resharding upgrade, slated for June, underscores its aggressive commitment to agentic commerce. By allowing the blockchain to automatically scale and split data loads in real time, this structural overhaul provides the raw throughput necessary to support millions of high-frequency AI agents executing autonomous transactions.

However, some industry skeptics caution that the network’s bullish “coordination layer” thesis catastrophically miscalculates how market value is actually captured. Critics argue that Near protocol has a history of shipping superior, highly scalable technical architecture that ultimately sits unused because it lacks distribution, developer mindshare, and enterprise integrations.

Opponents also warn that features like chain abstraction will be easily commoditized at the application layer by massive incumbents like Coinbase. Furthermore, because intense solver competition inherently drives network execution fees down to near-zero, skeptics maintain that high transaction volumes will ultimately become vanity metrics that fail to sustainably offset token emissions.