NEAR is returning to the market's spotlight.

On September 17, the NEAR Protocol token price rose to around $2.82 at one point, up nearly 16% in 24 hours, approaching the upper edge of the trading range that has formed since June of this year. At the same time, NEAR futures open interest has continued to increase, while ecosystem total value locked and spot trading volume have also rebounded in tandem.

But compared with this bullish candle itself, what is more noteworthy is how the market is重新 understanding NEAR: it is trying to shift from an ordinary Layer 1 to cross-chain trading and settlement infrastructure for AI Agents.

This is also what ETHNews sees as the most important medium-term logic behind this rally.

The AI narrative is beginning to move from story to "capital pricing"

Over the past year, NEAR has continuously strengthened its connection with AI.

The project has now publicly positioned itself as a blockchain for AI and has included combining AI with Intents, user-owned AI, and developing NEAR Intents into important on-chain trading infrastructure in its roadmap.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has also repeatedly emphasized that in the AI Agent economy, privacy may become one of the key pieces of infrastructure: if autonomous Agents in the future need to hold data, execute transactions, and perform cross-chain operations on behalf of users, then "who owns the data, and how Agents can safely call these data" will become a core issue.

This narrative has also gradually entered the视野 of traditional capital this year.

In January 2026, Grayscale submitted an application to convert the Grayscale NEAR Trust into a spot ETF; in July, T. Rowe Price launched an actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETP, and NEAR also entered the relevant product allocation scope.

These events do not mean that institutional products themselves directly drove NEAR's rise, but they at least provide a new observation angle: NEAR's AI infrastructure narrative is gradually moving from a project story within the crypto industry into the asset allocation framework.

Intents is becoming NEAR's most important fundamental validation

Compared with the relatively abstract label of "AI blockchain," NEAR's most convincing product at present may be NEAR Intents.

Traditional cross-chain transactions usually require users to handle wallets, Gas, bridges, and operational processes between different networks themselves, while Intents attempts to reverse this process: users only need to express the final result they want, and the underlying protocol is responsible for finding and executing the path.

For example, a user can directly propose "exchange $200 worth of Bitcoin for a certain token on Solana," and the protocol then completes order matching and execution through infrastructure such as Relayer.

This model is especially suitable for AI Agents.

If in the future an Agent needs to autonomously complete asset swaps, payments, or cross-chain settlements, it is not suitable to click through wallets, switch networks, and calculate Gas one by one like a human user, but rather needs a transaction interface that "only declares the goal, with the underlying layer executing automatically."

From the data perspective, Intents has already shown a certain scale of use.

Before integrating with Brave Wallet, NEAR Intents had cumulatively processed more than 19 million Swaps and $14 billion in transaction volume, covering 35 blockchains.

Among them, privacy assets are becoming a noteworthy growth direction. NEAR Intents had previously supported users in directly cross-chain swapping more than 100 types of tokens into Zcash (ZEC); this week, Intents officially launched Hydration, further supporting cross-chain swaps between ZEC and NEAR.

This means NEAR is currently bridging two hot market narratives: AI Agents on one side, and privacy assets, which are regaining attention, on the other.

Capital Begins to Enter, but $3 Remains a Key Level

On the market side, this NEAR rally is not just about spot price changes.

NEAR futures open interest has risen to about $656 million, approaching its highest level since the start of 2026, with open interest and price rising in tandem.

Generally speaking, when price and Open Interest rise simultaneously, it means new positions and leveraged capital are entering the market, rather than simple short covering. Therefore, this can reinforce the trend, but it also means that if prices reverse sharply, liquidations could further amplify volatility.

NEAR daily trading volume has also risen to about $820 million, significantly higher than the sluggish levels this summer; at the same time, NEAR on-chain DeFi total value locked rose nearly 15% in a single day, reaching about $150 million.

On the technical side, NEAR has now climbed above its 20-day, 50-day, and 200-day moving averages, forming a bullish alignment in which shorter-term moving averages sit above longer-term moving averages.

But short-term risks are also beginning to increase.

NEAR's 14-day RSI has risen to about 71, entering what is traditionally considered overbought territory. Over the past few months, NEAR has mainly traded between $1.60 and $2.40, and it is now approaching the prior resistance zone of $2.85 to $3.

Therefore, the original article argues that what is truly worth watching is not whether NEAR can briefly break above $3, but whether it can hold that level on a weekly basis. Only if $3 turns from resistance over the past few months into support could it signal a substantive change in the previous range-bound structure.

It is worth noting that the author also left an important caveat for this rally: at least one market institution, after reviewing NEAR's September price action, did not find a clear and verifiable single protocol catalyst that could fully explain the rise.

In other words, AI, Intents, and institutional products can explain why NEAR has re-entered the market's field of view, but they may not be enough to explain the entirety of this short-term gain.

Going forward, three indicators may be more worth watching: whether NEAR can continue to hold steadily around $3, whether Intents trading volume continues to grow, and whether ETF- and ETP-related products see real capital inflows.

If these fundamental indicators continue to improve, the market's pricing logic for NEAR may further shift from an "AI concept token" to "trading infrastructure for the AI Agent era"; if the fundamentals fail to keep pace with the price, the current rally may still be more of a momentum-driven move fueled by narrative and leverage.

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