Reassessing NEAR's Investment Logic: Has Trading Volume Taken Off, and Can Token Value Keep Up?

TL;DR NEAR's investment logic is shifting from a high-performance Layer 1 to chain abstraction, cross-chain settlement, and AI infrastructure, aiming to gain greater growth in a multi-chain ecosystem. NEAR Intents reportedly completed over $13 billion in cross-chain settlements, but there remains a significant gap between settlement scale and actual protocol revenue. NEAR's maximum annual inflation rate has decreased from 5% to about 2.5%, while developer gas refunds have been eliminated and transaction fee burns expanded, improving the tokenomics compared to the previous cycle. As of September 1, in the 30 days prior, NEAR-related products generated approximately $3.48 million in total fees, but net protocol fees were only about $757,500, indicating that value capture is still in its early stages. The founding team has a genuine background in AI and distributed systems, but AI products, partnerships, and user growth have yet to demonstrate sustained commercial revenue. NEAR still lags behind Ethereum and Solana in liquidity, developer scale, and application networks, and faces competition from Sui, Aptos, and other cross-chain infrastructures. The current derivatives market is generally bullish, but open interest has declined, and recent price increases may partly stem from short covering. NEAR is better viewed as a high-risk, high-reward optional investment rather than a core asset with stable cash flow and network moats.

NEAR is undergoing a significant strategic shift.

In the past, NEAR primarily competed as a high-performance Layer 1, focusing on sharding scalability, low fees, and fast confirmations. Now, it aims to reposition itself as the underlying infrastructure for multi-chain transactions and AI agents: users do not need to understand the complexities of blockchain; wallets and agents can automatically handle cross-chain transactions, exchanges, and payments.

NEAR Intents has already provided initial trading data for this direction, and the AI business has gained market attention due to the technical background of the founding team. Meanwhile, NEAR has reduced inflation, expanded fee burns, and is attempting to use product revenue for token buybacks.

The issue is that these advancements have not yet fully translated into sustained demand for NEAR tokens. Trading volumes can grow rapidly, but the actual revenue the protocol receives may be limited; AI products can utilize NEAR's technology without requiring users to hold NEAR tokens.

This makes NEAR a representative crypto asset: the technical direction is becoming clearer, but the economic loop remains to be validated.

From a public chain to a multi-chain transaction entry

NEAR was initially a general-purpose smart contract platform aimed at consumer applications. Its Nightshade architecture processes network states through sharding, aiming to expand capacity while maintaining low costs. According to project disclosures, NEAR currently has a block time of about 600 milliseconds, with final confirmations taking approximately 1.2 seconds; by 2025, the number of network shards will increase from 6 to 9, theoretically improving throughput by about 50%.

These performance metrics are not bad, but in today's public chain market, they are difficult to constitute a standalone advantage. Solana, Sui, Aptos, and Ethereum Layer 2 are all providing faster and cheaper transaction experiences. For NEAR, continuing to emphasize TPS and fees will only lead it into homogeneous competition.

Therefore, NEAR has begun to shift its development focus to "chain abstraction."

In simple terms, chain abstraction aims to make users unaware of which blockchain they are using and not have to manually handle cross-chain bridges, gas tokens, and transaction paths. Users only need to specify the outcome they desire, and the system can automatically find the appropriate network, liquidity, and execution plan.

NEAR Intents is the most important product in this strategy. Traditional cross-chain transactions usually require users to select bridges, trading platforms, and target networks; under the Intents model, users only need to submit their transaction intent, and solvers will find the best path across different platforms and liquidity pools.

Data disclosed by NEAR shows that the cumulative cross-chain settlement amount for Intents has exceeded $13 billion. Some community statistics estimate between $20 billion and $26 billion, covering 30 to 35 blockchains. Although different data may use varying time frames and statistical standards, it at least indicates that NEAR Intents has achieved a certain scale of real trading activity.

This also changes NEAR's potential market. In the past, the growth of a public chain primarily relied on developers deploying applications on that chain, attracting users and funds; if the Intents model holds, NEAR could participate in asset flows on other blockchains and earn revenue from cross-chain transactions, even without hosting all applications.

However, chain abstraction has an inherent contradiction: the smoother the user experience, the easier it is for the underlying network to be hidden. Users may utilize NEAR's execution capabilities without knowing that transactions have gone through NEAR, and they do not need to hold NEAR tokens directly.

At the same time, wallets, aggregators, cross-chain protocols, and other intent networks are competing for transaction entry points. Even if the settlement scale of NEAR Intents continues to expand, most fees may flow to solvers, market makers, and partner applications that provide quotes and liquidity. How much revenue NEAR can retain from this will be key to determining its valuation.

AI provides a new narrative, but commercial revenue still needs validation

AI is another main line of NEAR's strategic shift.

NEAR is laying out autonomous agents, confidential model operations, verifiable AI outputs, agent markets, machine-to-machine payments, and user-owned AI assistants. The project aims to combine the blockchain's capabilities in accounts, payments, and asset ownership with the automatic execution capabilities of AI agents.

Compared to some crypto projects that changed their positioning only after the AI boom, NEAR indeed has a more direct technical foundation. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin previously conducted machine learning research at Google and co-authored the foundational paper on the Transformer architecture, "Attention Is All You Need"; another co-founder, Alexander Skidanov, has experience in distributed databases and large system development.

This gives NEAR's AI transformation a degree of continuity, rather than merely seeking a hotter market label for the token.

According to project disclosures, NEAR's AI ecosystem already involves over 50 teams, covering research, data, storage, models, and applications. Relevant collaborations or integrations include Frax, Infinex, SWEAT, and Eliza. NEAR is also advancing AI assistants like IronClaw, hoping to enable agents to securely access accounts, hold assets, and execute transactions through trusted execution environments, credential isolation, and privacy protection.

There is also a natural intersection between AI and Intents. Future AI agents may need to autonomously purchase services, manage funds, and exchange assets across different blockchains. Intents can help agents find paths and liquidity, and NEAR has the opportunity to become the coordination and settlement layer for these machine-to-machine transactions.

The imagination space for this direction is vast, but commercial evidence remains limited. Having 50 AI teams does not equate to having 50 mature revenue sources, and collaborations and product launches do not guarantee stable paid demand. Centralized AI services already have mature computing power, tools, and enterprise clients, and NEAR must prove that the asset ownership, privacy, and verifiability brought by blockchain are sufficient to offset the additional technical complexity.

More importantly, even if AI products succeed, the value may not necessarily accrue to NEAR tokens. Agents may access services through third-party wallets, fees may be paid by applications, and end users may not need to purchase or hold NEAR long-term. Whether AI activities can generate protocol revenue and whether this revenue can create token demand remain two questions that have not been fully answered.

$13 billion in trading volume, but how much revenue is left in the end?

What is most noteworthy in NEAR's current investment logic is not the trading volume itself, but the gap between trading volume and protocol revenue.

According to the revenue panel cited in the original text, as of September 1, 2026, in the 30 days prior, NEAR-related products generated approximately $3.48 million in total fees. After deducting fees paid to solvers, partners, applications, and other participants, the net protocol fees were about $757,500.

In other words, the revenue that the protocol truly retains only accounts for a portion of the total fees. This distribution is not surprising: cross-chain transactions require solvers to provide quotes, market makers to provide liquidity, and applications and wallets also need to earn revenue. But for NEAR token holders, cross-chain transaction volume and total fees are not the most important numbers; net protocol revenue is much closer to the economic value that the underlying asset can capture.

Even so, net fees cannot be directly equated to shareholder cash flow. NEAR can use revenue for buybacks, staking, locking, ecosystem spending, or protocol treasury, but there are currently no fixed rules requiring all revenue to be used for token purchases. The use of funds is still influenced by governance decisions.

Therefore, when observing NEAR's fundamentals, looking only at user numbers, transaction counts, or Intents settlement amounts can easily overestimate growth quality. What truly matters are three questions: Is net protocol revenue consistently growing? Is the proportion of revenue to total transaction fees increasing? How much of this revenue ultimately translates into demand for NEAR purchases, burns, or long-term locking?

If Intents settlement amounts grow rapidly while net income remains at a low level, then NEAR may become a widely used infrastructure but may not be an asset that effectively captures value.

In recent years, NEAR has also been trying to address this issue. Its maximum annual inflation rate has decreased from 5% to about 2.5%; the developer gas refund mechanism has been eliminated, and related transaction fees will more fully enter the burn process; NEAR Intents has also enabled a fee switch and is attempting to use part of its product revenue for buybacks. According to project disclosures, this mechanism has already facilitated the buyback of over 1 million NEAR tokens.

The supply structure has also improved. Approximately 1.305 billion NEAR tokens are now fully or nearly fully circulating, with the circulating market cap closely aligned with the fully diluted valuation. Compared to new public chains that still have a large number of team and investor tokens waiting to be unlocked, NEAR faces lower concentration unlock pressure in the future.

However, being nearly fully circulating does not equate to deflation. NEAR's transaction fees are low, and even with high trading volumes, the burn scale may not be sufficient to offset the issuance from validator rewards. Buybacks also have a degree of discretion and have not yet formed a stable, predictable institutional arrangement.

NEAR needs to prove not just that its tokenomics "has improved," but that protocol revenue and fee burns can ultimately approach or exceed new issuance. Only by forming this closed loop can product growth be stably transmitted to token value.

The ecosystem is still growing, but a leadership position has yet to be established

NEAR's published user and transaction data is quite impressive. Its 2024 review shows that the network's monthly active users increased from 7 million the previous year to 40 million, with daily active users around 4 million and an average of over 8 million daily transactions. Ecosystem projects received approximately $146 million in external financing that year, and accelerator-participating teams raised about $50.5 million.

These figures at least indicate that NEAR is not a "ghost chain" that has lost developers and users. After experiencing the last bear market, it still retains its network, infrastructure, funding, and application ecosystem.

However, blockchain user metrics need to be interpreted cautiously. The so-called monthly active users may refer to accounts, addresses, or application interaction entities, which may include automated programs, subsidized activities, and low-value transactions, and cannot be directly understood in terms of independent user numbers like those on internet platforms.

The original text also did not obtain complete, independently verified recent user retention rates, stablecoin scales, TVL, and transaction quality data. Therefore, 40 million monthly active users and 8 million daily transactions can prove that the network is active, but do not independently prove that these activities will generate sustained revenue.

Developer data presents a similar situation. The data table cited in the original text from August 2026 indicates that the NEAR ecosystem has about 1,231 developers, 79,400 code submissions, and 234 code repositories. By the same statistical standard, Solana has about 1,494 developers, while Ethereum reaches 11,600.

NEAR clearly has a functioning developer ecosystem, but the gap with Ethereum remains significant, and it also lags behind Solana in liquidity and consumer application momentum. Applications like HOT Wallet, SWEAT, and KAIKAI have brought a certain user base to NEAR but have not yet formed killer products capable of changing the industry landscape.

NEAR faces competition across multiple markets. In the foundational public chain space, it competes with Ethereum, Solana, Sui, and Aptos for developers and funding; in the chain abstraction space, it faces wallets, trading aggregators, cross-chain bridges, and other intent networks; in the AI space, it must also compete with centralized cloud service providers and crypto projects focused on computing power, data, models, and privacy.

This gives NEAR both significant optionality and high execution risk. If multiple product lines can form synergies, NEAR may establish a complete system covering accounts, payments, cross-chain, and agents; if resources become overly dispersed, it may end up with many products but a consistently limited market position.

NEAR is currently closer to a technically credible, directionally differentiated mid-tier competitor rather than a market leader with a strong moat.

Core judgment: NEAR needs to prove more than just technology

The most attractive investment logic for NEAR currently is to become the coordination, transaction, and settlement infrastructure in the multi-chain and AI agent economy. If this vision is realized, the market NEAR can cover may far exceed that of a single Layer 1 and establish new value capture paths through Intents fees, agent payments, and token buybacks.

NEAR's advantages include a strong founding team, a long operational track record, sharding architecture, a nearly fully circulating token structure, reduced inflation rates, and differentiated directions formed by AI and chain abstraction.

However, its biggest risk may not be technical failure, but rather remaining in a state of "technically reliable, product-rich but economically secondary" for a long time. NEAR may continue to operate stably, maintain its developer community, and continuously launch new products, yet fail to form a sufficiently strong application network, protocol revenue, and token demand.

The most important indicators to track next include NEAR Intents net income and profit margins, non-incentivized user retention, stablecoin and TVL growth, real commercial revenue from AI products, effective token inflation rates, and the transparency of buybacks and treasury funds.

Ultimately, NEAR needs to answer three questions: How much revenue can the protocol retain from the growth of Intents transactions? Will AI and cross-chain products create direct demand for NEAR tokens? Can protocol revenue, burns, and buybacks long-term offset new issuance?

Before these questions are fully validated, NEAR is better viewed as a high-risk asset betting on the development of AI and multi-chain infrastructure. Its technical foundation and product direction offer significant upside potential, but its commercialization capability, value capture, and competitive pressures will still determine whether this transformation can truly lead to a revaluation.