What Is NEAR – and Why Is the Price Rising While the Users Leave?

On 29 September 2026 the first US fund holding NEAR directly began trading on NYSE Arca: the Bitwise NEAR ETF, ticker NRR. In the same month NEAR rose 178 percent, more than in any month since it listed in October 2020.

Seeing that, most people assume the chain is being used more than before. The opposite is true. NEAR itself now processes 83 percent fewer transactions than a year ago. The money comes from somewhere else, and anyone buying NEAR should know where, and how much of it reaches the token.

NEAR is a fast chain split into parts

NEAR launched in 2020 as a smart-contract platform in the same league as Ethereum or Solana. What sets it apart is sharding: the chain is split into nine parts that process transactions in parallel. A block is produced every 0.6 seconds. Accounts carry readable names like alice.near instead of long strings of characters.

NEAR is secured by staking. On 1 October 2026, 533 million NEAR were staked with 413 active validators, 41 percent of all coins. Eight validators together hold more than a third of the stake and could halt the chain between them. The largest are Astro-Stakers with 5.9 percent and Figment with 5.4 percent.

Technically, NEAR is fast and cheap. The question is who uses it.

What makes it different: NEAR can control addresses on other chains

Since 2024 a NEAR account can sign transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana without a bridge. The method is called Chain Signatures. NEAR Intents, launched in November 2024, is built on it.

An intent is an order that states the goal, not the route: "I want Zcash for my USDT on Ethereum." So-called solvers, mostly professional trading firms, bid for the order within about a second. The best quote wins, and settlement happens on NEAR. The user does not need to own any NEAR and often does not notice that NEAR is involved. Many wallets and swap sites plug the service in behind the scenes.

NEAR Intents is a swap service for other chains that settles on NEAR.

What does that mean for NEAR's own chain?

On its own chain, the users are leaving

According to the block explorer NearBlocks, each figure the average of the 30 days to 30 September:

The peak came on 22 April 2024 with 2.26 million active accounts in a single day. At the time the Telegram game HOT had users "mining" a token on NEAR. Whether it carried the peak cannot be separated in the public data. What is certain is that the peak is gone.

Less money sits on the chain as well. The stock of stablecoins, dollar tokens such as USDC and USDT, fell according to DefiLlama from a high of $758 million (7 August 2024) to $88 million on 1 October 2026. Capital locked in DeFi applications recently rose back to $251 million, mostly because the NEAR price rose.

Measured by its own users, NEAR is a shrinking chain.

So where does the money moving the price come from?

The money comes in through other chains

According to DefiLlama, October to September in each case:

In the year to September 2026, Intents earned the chain 5.6 times as much as all of its own users combined. In September alone, $4.8 billion ran through the service, $160 million a day.

Most of the gross fees stay with the wallets and swap sites that bring in the orders. NEAR captured 14 percent over the year and 26 percent in September. Since 23 February 2026, NEAR has used that money to buy back its own coins on the market.

Buying NEAR for its usage does not buy a share of NEAR's users. It buys a fee on swaps between other chains.

And behind that fee is a service that makes decisions. The last ten days show which ones.

Behind the revenue is an operator

On 24 September, $387.5 million was stolen from the exchange Bitget. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen suspected hackers from North Korea. The attackers then tried to swap the loot into other coins through swap services.

On 28 September, Alex Shevchenko, general manager of NEAR Intents, described what reached Intents. The screening system SHIELD, he said, rejected orders worth more than $50 million, froze about $503,000 mid-swap and let about $166,000 through. NEAR Intents waived the 10 percent recovery bounty Bitget had offered.

That makes Intents something other than neutral plumbing that executes every order. An operator screens orders against risk data and can hold funds. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin draws the line this way: the chain stays open to everyone, an application on it may decide for itself. The swap service THORChain rejected no orders and swapped $6.3 million for the attackers.

On 1 October it was Intents' turn. A bug in the interaction between Omni, the deposit and withdrawal system for other chains, and the Intents contract cost about $3.8 million. Intents halted operations, closed the hole and promised full compensation to everyone affected. Deposits and withdrawals on eleven chains, including BNB Chain, Polygon and TON, stayed closed for about twelve hours longer. According to on-chain investigator ZachXBT, the money went to the exchange KuCoin and moved on from there as bitcoin. NEAR closed the day 9.9 percent lower, Bitcoin 1.5 percent higher.

At 00:18 UTC on 2 October, Shevchenko wrote to the attacker on X: "We have identified you, sir." He gave them 48 hours to return the funds. He did not say who the attacker is or how they were found. At 01:15 UTC, the three return addresses he posted were still empty.

For scale: $3.8 million is more than half of what Intents delivered to the token over the whole year to September, which was $7.1 million. The announcements up to 2 October do not say where the compensation will come from.

Buying NEAR for Intents also means buying an operator's decisions and its mistakes.

Is the fee this service generates enough to carry the token?

The buyback covers a tenth of new issuance

NEAR has no fixed cap. On 30 September there were 1,307.7 million NEAR. Until October 2025, 5 percent were added every year. Since 30 October 2025 it is 2.5 percent, about 32 million NEAR a year.

The halving has a notable history. A token-holder vote in summer 2025 missed the required two-thirds majority. The halving went ahead anyway, because validators holding 80 percent of the stake installed the new software. The data confirm it: since November 2025 the supply has grown at an annualised 2.47 percent.

Two outflows stand against that. 70 percent of fees on NEAR's own chain are burned, about 480,000 NEAR over the last year. And there is the Intents buyback: on 1 October the buyback wallet held 1.85 million NEAR. Over the same period since 23 February, 19.2 million new NEAR were created.

Even the record month of September barely changes this. Annualised, its $1.85 million of revenue would have bought back 12.8 percent of new issuance. At the 30 September price, the new issuance is worth $173 million a year.

If you stake your NEAR, you receive part of that issuance. If you only hold it, you carry dilution of about 2.5 percent a year.

The buyback is real. It offsets a tenth of what is created every year.

At what volume would it be enough?

The higher the price, the further the threshold moves away

On 12 March 2026 SVRN Research, together with The Tie, published a widely quoted report. At $177 million of Intents volume a day, it said, the buyback would offset new issuance and NEAR would stop growing in supply. In September volume ran at $160 million a day. If the story ended here, the threshold would almost be reached.

The calculation rests on two assumptions that do not hold.

First, it assumes that all fees buy NEAR. In fact NEAR captured 26 percent in September and 14 percent over the year.

Second, it uses a price of $1.22. New issuance is a fixed number of coins. When the price rises, it becomes more expensive in dollars, and every dollar of revenue buys back fewer coins. The report states the opposite: that a higher price lowers the threshold.

With actual September figures and the price of $5.34, the threshold is about $1.23 billion of volume a day. That is nearly eight times the record month.

Every rise in the price raises the bar the volume would have to clear.

What has the price made of it so far?

The price moves with Bitcoin and falls further

Monthly returns in US dollars from Binance monthly candles, from the listing on 14 October 2020 to September 2026, Bitcoin over the same period:

When Bitcoin falls, NEAR almost always falls with it, at the median about twice as far. A correlation of 0.53 means the two often move together, but NEAR has large moves of its own. The largest is September 2026 at +178 percent. Without it, NEAR would stand at +48 percent since listing, Bitcoin at +588 percent.

The all-time high on a closing basis was $20.18 on 14 January 2022. On 30 September 2026 NEAR closed at $5.34, 74 percent below it.

Since 18 September the Arena counts the run as parabolic: a close at least twice the 200-day average and at least 50 percent above the level 30 days earlier. Across all Binance pairs, at the first end of such a run the price stood at the median 13.6 percent below the day the run began and 34.5 percent below the peak. That is 516 runs, 74 of them independent in time. It is not a forecast for NEAR.

September was NEAR's best month since 2020. Anyone holding since 2020 is still far behind Bitcoin.

Claims about NEAR, checked

The pattern: the volume figures are right. What does not hold is the calculation that turns volume into value for the token.

The obvious objection

"Intents runs on NEAR. If Intents grows, NEAR is being used. Where is the problem?"

That is true. Intents is real usage, and it is growing faster than almost anything else in this market. But the user does not need NEAR for it, and the wallets and swap sites that offer the service keep most of the fees. Over the year to September, the token captured a seventh of gross fees. For the token, what counts is not how much runs through Intents. It is how much of it NEAR buys back.

What this means for you

If you buy NEAR because the chain has many users: that number fell by four fifths in a year.

If you buy NEAR because Intents is growing: that is the right story but the wrong number. The volume headlines measure what runs through the service, not what reaches the token. And the service has an operator that rejects orders and can itself be attacked.

If you hold NEAR: without staking you carry about 2.5 percent dilution a year. The buyback currently offsets about a tenth of it.

NEAR's users today are the users of other chains. They pay, but only a seventh of it reaches the token.

Three numbers show whether that changes. The buyback per month against new issuance per month, currently $1.85 million against about $14 million. The share of fees that NEAR captures, currently 14 to 26 percent. And daily volume against the threshold of about $1.23 billion, which rises with every price increase. The open question is whether NEAR can raise its share of fees without the wallets moving to a different swap service.

FAQ

What is a solver? A trader, usually a firm with its own capital, that executes orders through Intents. It sources the coins wherever they are cheapest, for example on a centralised exchange, and delivers them on the target chain.

How is the $1.23 billion threshold calculated? Issuance of 2.47 percent of 1,307.7 million NEAR is 32.3 million NEAR a year; times $5.34 that is $173 million a year or $473,000 a day. In September, 0.038 percent of volume reached NEAR ($1.85 million of $4.8 billion). $473,000 ÷ 0.000384 gives about $1.23 billion of volume a day. Fees burned on NEAR's own chain, about 480,000 NEAR a year, are not included. They change the result by 1.5 percent.

Why count the buyback wallet's balance rather than the dollar total? Because issuance happens in NEAR. Since February, $5.33 million of revenue has bought 1.85 million NEAR. How many coins a dollar buys depends on the price.

How are the monthly returns calculated? Month's close against the prior month's close, NEAR and BTC each against USDT on Binance, without fees. October 2020 starts from the opening price on the listing day, 14 October, for both.

All NEAR monthly returns in US dollars

Figures in percent. October 2020 from listing on 14 October.

Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast — historical patterns are no guarantee.

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