NEAR Protocol gains 83% in four weeks, leaving Bitcoin and Ether behind
NEAR Protocol's native token climbed at least 83% over a recent 30-day window. Bitcoin managed roughly 5% and Ether about 1% over the same stretch.Some measurements of the move run even higher, up to 172% across 30-day periods between September and October 2026.The rally pushed NEAR back into the top 20 crypto assets by market capitalization.Market capitalization peaked at around $7.2 billion, with the token trading near $5.50 at that high point. As of early October, NEAR was moving between $4.70 and $5.50.The first big catalyst was Wall Street-shaped. The Bitwise NRR, the first US spot NEAR ETF, launched on September 29, 2026.It pulled in nearly $58 million during its first week. For a token that previously required a crypto exchange account to own, that is a meaningful new on-ramp.A spot ETF holds the actual token rather than futures contracts. That means a brokerage customer buying NRR shares can create real demand for NEAR itself, without ever touching a wallet or a seed phrase.The second driver is NEAR Intents, the network's cross-chain trading system. Cumulative volume has passed somewhere in the range of $31-33 billion, spread across more than 30 chains.The rally did not arrive without drama. NEAR Intents suffered a $3.8 million exploit in early October 2026.The funds were fully recovered within 24 hours.Meanwhile, NEAR's community is debating a change to how many new tokens the network creates each year. A governance proposal would lower maximum annual issuance from 2.5% to 1.6%, phased in over two years.The proposal could avoid roughly 66 million new tokens over six years. At late-September prices, that supply would have been worth about $329 million.There is a tradeoff. Staking yields would fall from approximately 5.4% to 3.5%, since rewards come from the newly issued tokens being cut.NEAR is a sharded Layer-1 blockchain. Sharding splits the network into parallel pieces that process transactions simultaneously.Despite the recent surge, the token sits well below its all-time high of around $20, set in January 2022. The current $4.70 to $5.50 range is still a fraction of that peak.The NRR launch puts NEAR into a small group of assets that US investors can buy through a standard brokerage account, and nearly $58 million in first-week inflows shows some of them are using it.The issuance proposal fits that new audience. Lower dilution is the kind of feature that appeals to longer-term holders who care more about supply discipline than about squeezing out a few extra percentage points of yield.For stakers, the math changes. A drop from approximately 5.4% to 3.5% is meaningful for anyone running a yield strategy.Technical signals point to caution in the near term. NEAR's Relative Strength Index has at times pushed above 70-80, readings that typically mark overbought conditions.