Crypto: NEAR explodes after several weeks of accumulation
The price move was brutal. On September 13, NEAR closed at around $2.30. On the 16th, it reached $2.62. It then hit $3.15 on the 17th and $3.76 on the 18th, before ending the 19th at around $3.59. CoinGecko put its market capitalization at nearly $4.9 billion, with almost $2 billion traded over 24 hours.
The contrast with the situation observed a few days earlier in the altcoin market is notable. NEAR was then among the assets whose CVD remained negative, indicating that aggressive sellers still dominated some flows. Since then, the market has completely shifted pace.
Nevertheless, the +80% figure shared on social media needs to be qualified. CoinGecko’s daily series points instead to a gain of around 50% to 60%, depending on the selected starting and ending points. Certain intraday peaks or platforms may obviously show larger moves, but $4.20 as a sustained price does not appear in the main verified data.
The rise is still more than enough to qualify as a rally.
On September 18, NEAR was still up nearly 30% over 24 hours, while its volume approached $1.8 billion.
Perpetuals become confidential by default
The most visible catalyst arrived on September 17.
NEAR integrated Hyperliquid-based perpetual futures into near.com, with a privacy layer enabled by default. The protocol presents this feature as the sector’s first “confidential by default” perpetuals offering. This wording comes from NEAR and should therefore be understood as a project claim, not as an independent ranking of all existing DeFi platforms.
The principle is simple: a trader can open a position on a Hyperliquid perpetual without making it publicly obvious that the position belongs to them.
This changes a great deal in a blockchain environment.
On a conventional public chain, a sufficiently motivated analyst can track a wallet, observe its deposits, see when funds reach a protocol and sometimes reconstruct an entire strategy. For an individual buying $200 worth of a token, the stakes remain limited. For a fund, whale or treasury managing several million dollars, the information can be valuable.
NEAR is specifically trying to break that link.
The project explains that its Confidential Intents use an execution layer where certain information is not published as it would be on a conventional blockchain. The aim is to prevent strategies from being exposed, as well as frontrunning and some forms of MEV.
The perpetual itself is not, however, completely invisible.
And that distinction is essential.
The trade remains visible on Hyperliquid
NEAR is not turning Hyperliquid into a dark pool.
Positions continue to exist within Hyperliquid’s market infrastructure, and order-book activity remains observable. What becomes difficult to trace is the relationship between the trader’s public account, the source of their funds and the corresponding position.
In other words, the market knows that a position exists.
It does not necessarily know who opened it.
This architecture is subtler than a fully private blockchain. It preserves a market where execution remains observable while providing greater protection for the trader’s economic identity.
BubbleNexus summarizes the mechanism fairly clearly: positions are visible on Hyperliquid’s order book, but the confidential layer makes it difficult to link a specific position to its initial deposit and the wallet that funded it.
This difference may seem minor.
It is not.
Professional traders hate revealing their intentions. On a traditional market, a large institution does not voluntarily publish before execution the exact amount it wants to buy or sell, its entry level and the structure of its position.
Public blockchains have long done exactly the opposite.
Everything is visible.
Address.
Amount.
Timing.
History.
In some situations, that transparency becomes a cost.
NEAR is therefore trying to add a feature often missing from DeFi: the ability to trade publicly without having to expose one’s entire strategy publicly.
A private shard and a TEE-secured bridge
Technically, the privacy layer relies on infrastructure separate from the conventional public NEAR network.
NEAR says Confidential Intents operates on a dedicated private shard run by a set of independent permissioned validators. The shard then communicates with the mainnet through a bridge based on Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs.
A TEE can simply be described as a protected area inside a processor. The code running there is isolated from the rest of the machine to limit access to sensitive data.
NEAR favors this approach over an architecture based entirely on zero-knowledge proofs.
The trade-off is interesting.
ZK proofs can offer very strong cryptographic guarantees, but they often add complexity, computing costs and sometimes a cumbersome user experience. NEAR says its system avoids client-side proof generation, complex synchronization and specialized wallets.
There is also a downside.
An architecture relying on TEEs and a permissioned set of validators does not offer exactly the same trust model as a protocol that is fully public and verifiable by anyone.
The shortcut “privacy = no trust required” should therefore be avoided.
The model provides better protection for certain data.
It also introduces its own technical assumptions.
This becomes particularly important when a product enables leveraged trading involving millions of dollars.
Hyperliquid provides the market, NEAR provides the private layer
NEAR did not build a new perpetuals exchange from scratch.
This is probably one of the product’s smartest choices.
Hyperliquid provides the trading infrastructure, order book, liquidity and derivatives markets. NEAR mainly adds its routing, cross-chain abstraction and now privacy layers.
Hyperliquid itself has changed status in recent months. At the beginning of September, HYPE entered the Nasdaq CME Crypto Index with an initial weighting of 3.36%, almost matching Solana. The network is therefore no longer just an experimental DEX hidden deep within DeFi. Its infrastructure now processes enough volume to attract institutional indices.
NEAR is tapping into that depth instead of trying to recreate it.
The rest runs through NEAR Intents.
The protocol now reports more than $29 billion in historical volume across 35 blockchains. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, XRP Ledger, Avalanche, Cardano, Zcash and several other networks appear in the supported ecosystem.
Users therefore do not necessarily have to manually transfer their assets to Hyperliquid before getting started.
NEAR Intents can handle some of the routing and conversions.
This detail explains why the product goes beyond simple privacy.
NEAR is also trying to hide the complexity of cross-chain operations.
The product targets a real DeFi problem
In crypto, privacy has long been treated as an almost ideological subject.
Bitcoin is transparent.
Monero conceals transactions.
Zcash enables shielded transactions.
The debate centered on anonymity, surveillance and sometimes sanctions.
NEAR’s case is different.
Privacy becomes a market tool here.
When a large order appears before execution, bots may try to frontrun it. When a trader moves a large amount of collateral, competitors can anticipate a future position. When a known address starts accumulating an asset, thousands of people can copy the move.
NEAR directly highlights these problems: order, pair, direction and timing can all be visible before settlement on traditional public systems. Its confidential layer seeks to reduce that exposure.
This development is part of a broader trend that Bref Crypto had already identified among the crypto narratives of 2026. Privacy is no longer limited to privacy coins. It is beginning to become a feature integrated into financial applications.
A fund may want to prove that it complies with certain rules without publishing its entire strategy.
A company may want to settle with a supplier without making its contract visible to everyone.
A trader may want to take a position without displaying the address controlling their other assets.
NEAR is even planning selective disclosure, allowing certain information to be revealed when necessary for compliance without publishing all activity.
This is much closer to institutional needs than absolute anonymity.
The NEAR rally probably does not come from a single product
It would nevertheless be too easy to explain the entire rise in the token solely through confidential perpetuals.
NEAR had already started rising before the launch.
On September 5, the token closed at around $2.19. On the 9th, it reached $2.48. After several hesitant sessions, the acceleration really took place between September 16 and 18.
The broader context also helped.
Bitcoin moved back above $80,000.
Ethereum reclaimed $2,600.
Solana, Arbitrum and several Layer 1 networks rose sharply.
The market is beginning to take on more risk in altcoins.
NEAR is simply adding a particularly well-positioned narrative: privacy, derivatives trading, Hyperliquid and cross-chain abstraction at the same time.
The project is also benefiting from growing interest in Confidential Intents. Several industry sources indicate that the value deposited in this confidential infrastructure has exceeded $70 million, triggering an initial milestone in the associated incentive program.
These factors can reinforce one another.
Product launched.
Volume rising.
Token climbing.
More visibility.
Even more traders.
The danger is obviously the same in the other direction.
A price advancing much faster than real adoption can also correct sharply when speculation slows.
After a gain of more than 50%, the market becomes much more demanding
The current price makes it necessary to temper the enthusiasm somewhat.
On September 20, several technical indicators placed NEAR in overbought territory, with an RSI around or above 70 depending on the platform. An analysis published on Sunday put the token at around $3.49 after a decline of roughly 5% and an intraday high near $3.75.
After a move of 50% to 60% in one week, a correction would be unsurprising.
Volume also exploded. CoinGecko recorded approximately $228 million on September 14, followed by $582 million on the 17th, $1.28 billion on the 18th and nearly $1.98 billion on the 19th.
That is relatively healthy for the rally’s depth.
But it also shows that many speculative positions entered the market very quickly.
The next question is therefore less exciting than the pump: will these traders remain once the novelty of the launch has passed?
NEAR’s price must now find a balance between an infrastructure that is genuinely improving and expectations that have already accelerated sharply.
This is often where altcoins are most difficult to assess.
A good product can justify a higher valuation.
It does not justify just any price.
Privacy will still have to prove its advantage
NEAR’s launch is nevertheless more interesting than the token’s single candlestick.
Crypto has been trying for years to resolve a contradiction.
Public blockchains are useful because they are transparent.
This transparency makes it possible to verify the state of the system without trusting a bank.
But real-world finance rarely operates with total transparency.
A company does not want to publish its treasury transactions one by one.
A fund does not want to reveal every move before execution.
A market maker does not want to give away its entire strategy for free.
The solution may therefore not be a choice between everything public and everything private.
It could involve making some information verifiable and other information confidential.
That is precisely the territory NEAR is trying to occupy.
The protocol is not alone. Zcash’s comeback and privacy’s emergence as a major market theme show that the subject now extends beyond traditional cypherpunk communities.
NEAR is simply pursuing a different approach.
Not a private currency.
Not a fully opaque blockchain.
A public infrastructure capable of creating confidential execution zones.
If this architecture genuinely attracts institutional volume, the launch of NEAR’s perpetuals on September 17 may later be seen as an important milestone.
If usage remains marginal, it will mainly be remembered for a spectacular NEAR pump.
For now, both stories are moving forward together.
The token has soared.
The product genuinely exists.
And for once in crypto, privacy is not being sold as a way to hide the market, but as a way to prevent the market from reading the trader before they have finished trading.
