NEAR Protocol price surged by over 12% today, trading at $1.38 after briefly touching $1.44, the highest print since the recent cycle low near $0.95. The move caps a 41.28% weekly advance, one that gained structural legs following the activation of Confidential Intents on March 3. NEAR crypto now trades with $687.4 million in daily volume, a 43.5% surge, while its market cap sits just under $1.78 billion.
NEAR Intents Hit $541M Weekly Volume as Privacy-First AI Trading Feature Goes Mainnet
The core catalyst is Confidential Intents, an optional privacy layer that lets users obscure order size, timing, and routing details through a private shard connected to the mainnet, while remaining audit-compliant. That matters specifically for institutional desks and AI-driven execution flows that need execution privacy without sacrificing regulatory cover.
NEAR Intents are already processing roughly $2.7 billion in 30-day volume across 35+ chains, with weekly volume at nearly $541 million and the protocol collecting approximately $950,000 in fees over the same period.
Daily asset breakdown shows USDT leading at $36 million, followed by USDC at $17.6 million and BTC at $10 million, a composition that reads more like a liquidity routing layer than a typical DeFi application.
Separately, agentic payment infrastructure, where autonomous AI agents execute on-chain transactions, is scaling, and NEAR’s architecture is positioned to absorb a meaningful share of that settlement flow.
NEAR Protocol Price Prediction: Analyst Eyes $1.97 Breakout Level
The 4-hour chart shows NEAR coin climbing from sub-$1.00 territory on February 23 to the $1.44 peak in a near-vertical impulse, with buyers consistently absorbing each pullback into the $1.15–$1.20 range before the final leg higher. Price is now consolidating around $1.38, just above the $1.40 level that served as the dotted reference line on the TradingView chart.
Analyst More Crypto Online identified the current structure as a three-wave advance from the recent swing low, noting that a push above $1.97 would confirm that wave iv is already developing, with Fibonacci extension levels projecting targets at $2.03 (38.2%), $2.66 (50%), and $3.48 (61.8%) on the daily. That $1.97 level is the line traders are watching.
Michaël van de Poppe flagged the NEAR/BTC pair, noting that new cycle lows had printed bullish divergence on both the RSI and the MACD, a setup he called strong and valid.
He suggests that once the NEAR Protocol price reclaims its prior BTC-denominated support level, the relative-strength trade accelerates. Volume on the recent 4-hour legs confirms buyer conviction; the largest green-volume bars on the chart correspond directly to the breakout candles above $1.20 and again at $1.40, not noise rallies. The next key read is whether $1.35 holds as support on any near-term retest.
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