🚩 Why NEAR Spikes 50% - Crypto Token Analysis

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The NEAR Protocol is on a massive run, and that's because Arthur Hayes is supporting the project. The question is, how much longer can this hype last? Is this the beginning of a longer-term rally, or is it just a pump and dump orchestrated by the insiders? Let's have a look at the data most people aren't considering. Let's have a look at the derivatives market, at the on-chain metrics. Let's see what's happening under the hood. Now, this here is the TVL, the total value locked of the NEAR chain over time, measured in US dollars.

[00:00:31]Here's the same measured in NEAR Protocol tokens. So, maybe there is some long-term adoption here. Maybe it does make sense to buy and hold NEAR over several years. Hi, my name is Gerhard.

[00:00:44]I've been in the crypto space for the last 8 years. I hit my first million 3 years ago, and in this video I want to share the data that I personally look at in order to outperform just buying and holding Bitcoin, which I did over the last 5 years by on average 2% per month.

[00:00:59]The data is linked down below this video. It's over here in copy trading.

[00:01:04]It shows what I personally do in order to outperform the market, and over the last 5 years that's the chart. But, of course, not every single month is an outperform. There is some volatility, but in the end the long term is what matters. Now, here's the news around Arthur Hayes including NEAR Protocol in his top three altcoins. So, that's now NEAR, Hyperliquid, and Zcash. Zcash has rebranded itself to be an AI-focused blockchain. Arthur Hayes is predicting a 20x for the NEAR token, only a 5x for ZEC because Zcash is much larger in market cap. But, how much upside potential is there really? What we see over here, that's the NEAR price measured in US dollars over time, and this is the recent rally. How likely is it that from here we're going to see the prices of the all-time high again? That we're going to appreciate by more than 600%.

[00:02:00]That's what we are trying to answer in this video. Now, there is a lot of correlation within crypto, right? When Bitcoin goes up, when Ethereum goes up, most altcoins go up as well. When those two major assets go down, then most altcoins come down with it. So, really what you want to look at is relative performance. How does NEAR Protocol perform relative to Bitcoin, relative to Ethereum, relative to the altcoin market in general? Investing is a game of opportunity cost. And when we take on more risk by buying a smaller altcoin, we should also expect more long-term performance. Otherwise, risk-adjusted, it doesn't make much sense. And so, what we've got over here, that's the NEAR Protocol price divided by the Bitcoin price. Since October of 2020, so that's now 5 and 1/2 years ago, NEAR underperformed Bitcoin by 64%. From the all-time high in relative valuation. So, that's since January of 2022, NEAR underperformed Bitcoin by 92%.

[00:03:00]If we were to work with the assumption that NEAR will always keep pace with Bitcoin, then it would reach this equilibrium line, this dotted line. And that would mean an outperformance by another 164%.

[00:03:14]Now, there's a lot of volatility in this chart. When we look at NEAR relative to the altcoin market, the volatility goes down a bit. And here, the trends are clearer. As in, long term we tend to go down, the bottoms align relatively well, the tops align relatively well. And relative to the rest of the altcoin market, there might be another 120% in the absolute best case. Now, why do we have a NEAR Protocol price underperforming the rest of the altcoin market over all of those years? I think the answer to that question is just token inflation. More and more tokens hit the market over time. And that's shown in this chart here. So, this is the circulating supply of NEAR Protocol over time. It started off with less than 100 million tokens, and now we are at 1.2 billion tokens. So, more than a 10x in the supply. It's very hard to see so much additional demand that a 10x in circulating supply can be completely offset. So, prices measured in US dollars, they go up and down with the general market, but prices relative to Bitcoin or relative to the rest of the altcoin market go up and down relative to the incremental demand and supply.

[00:04:26]And when the incremental supply is growing because of the inflation, but the demand doesn't grow at the same rate, then we see the price coming down.

[00:04:33]Now, the tokenomics have improved for NEAR Protocol because the foundation, the early adopters, the team, etc., they already got their supply. The only source of further supply increase is the epoch rewards, so the regular inflation rate of NEAR. So, we are at 1.2 billion right now. In a year, we will be at 1.4 billion. So, this is more inflation than Bitcoin, than Ethereum, than Solana. And so, here's then the impact of an ever-increasing supply. Have a look at the price chart, at the long-term price chart of NEAR Protocol. We see how from cycle to cycle, the tops tend to be lower and lower. Now, compare that with the market cap chart. The market cap tends to top out at very similar levels, at around $8 billion. So, the price declines much quicker than the market cap does, again because there's more and more tokens floating around. It takes more and more capital to regain prior heights. But, this chart also tells us a story of how much higher NEAR can safely go from here. Another 2x seems quite reasonable. That would bring us to 6.8, 6.9 billion in market cap, and we have been at those limits before. If we assume that future market cap peaks will continue to slightly decline, we could hit 7.5 billion in the next weeks. So, let's run the numbers. 7.5 billion divided by 3.5 billion. That brings us a 2.14 x at the current price, which is $2.68.

[00:06:09]That brings us to a target of $5.74.

[00:06:14]At that level, the air might be getting thinner. But again, this gives us a 2 x from here, a bit over a 2 x, not a 20 x that Arthur Hayes is predicting. A 20 x would mean 70 billion in market cap, much higher than we've ever seen in the past. But how likely is it that we're going to hit 70 billion for a NEAR Protocol? Let's have a look at the usage. Let's see how much the NEAR Protocol or the blockchain is used over time and if there is a long-term growing adoption trend. Here is the number of daily transactions on the NEAR chain. We had quite some nice growth up until the end of 2024, but since then the number of transactions fell very consistently.

[00:06:59]Here we've got the number of unique accounts. That topped in summer of 2024.

[00:07:05]Here is the transaction fee chart. That also is very low because the chain obviously is not at its capacity limits right now. So, transactions are very cheap. Every single day, the entire chain collects fees of only $2,000 right now. And at the peak, that was more than $50,000 per day. Now, NEAR Protocol has a ported token on the Ethereum chain. Let's have a look at those statistics as well. So, we've got 12,000 holders of that token. And what we see here on the left, that's the number of wallets who have at least 350 NEAR tokens. That's a bit under $1,000 worth of the token right now. So, that's the retail investor. The number of retail investors is going up over time.

[00:07:49]It's slightly above 1,000 right now. In the middle, we've got the number of wallets with 3,500 tokens, so a bit under $10,000 worth of the token. That also tends to go up, but it peaked at the beginning of the year. On the right, we've got another 10x, so that's now a bit under $100,000 worth of the token.

[00:08:10]The number of whales is not necessarily going up. That's for the ported token of Near on the Ethereum chain. And that's all happening while the number of buyers and sellers on the Ethereum chain of the Near token is actually growing over time. So, the activity of the token goes up, but the whales seem to not really be interested in participating in that activity. And so, nowadays, a lot of trading volume does not happen on the spot market anymore, and it does also not happen on chain anymore. A lot of activity now happens just with levered bets on the price. So, in the last 24 hours, we had 170 million worth of trading volume on Binance on the spot market. Compare that with the perpetual futures market with 870 million worth of trading volume. So, check out the funding rate of Near over time. It tends to be positive. In other words, most people that are betting on the Near price, they're betting on the price to go up. They have a long bias. They have to pay the shorts in order to bet on a rising Near price. And so, with that rally, we have seen a lot of shorts getting liquidated, reinforcing that long bias. But there's a problem, and that's this chart over here. There is a lot of open interest now. Open interest, so the amount of bets on the Near price is at an all-time high. Short-term speculation on Near is at an all-time high. If you are long-term interested in Near, you just buy it on the spot market. You wouldn't finance your purchases, especially with the high funding rate, on the perpetual futures market. Everybody that just bets on the price and doesn't buy spot directly is planning to sell at some point, rather in the near future. Because, again, financing costs at least 11 to 12% per annum on the perpetual futures. And if you want to hold much longer term, then you're just buying spot and potentially get cheaper financing. But if you're interested in getting in and out of the token for very low slippage, then you're using the perps. And that's the problem, because there is a correlation between the open interest, so the amount of bets on the price, and the price itself. As in, when there is a lot of attention, a lot of open interest, the price is high.

[00:10:24]When that attention goes down, when there's less people that speculate on NEAR, then the price crashes together with it. And the problem is we are already now so high in open interest that if the attention moves to another token in the near future, then the price will come down with it. In other words, I personally, I have rather a short bias on NEAR. I'm going against the grain.

[00:10:46]I'm rather looking for an entry opportunity to bet on a falling NEAR price, because I do think that over time, with very little activity on chain, and with all of that hype that we now see in the news, I think that over time this will move to somewhere else.

[00:10:59]And so, I rather want to bet on this thing to go down. Now, I don't know when it will go down. We could see the turnaround very soon. We could see it with the next resistance or with the next one. It's not easy to time those shorts, especially when we are currently with extremely bullish momentum. But as usual, I have run the numbers. I have done a back test on how to trade NEAR.

[00:11:24]So, this is NEAR relative to the others market cap. How is NEAR doing compared to all other altcoins? I tried to find the best golden and death crosses. So, that's a moving average combination.

[00:11:36]We've got this strategy over here, the 16-day versus the 186-day simple moving average. Let's have a look at how this develops over time. So, that's then the following chart. And based on that, we haven't even yet turned bullish. In other words, this resistance might still hold. We have come up much faster than we did in the past. And so, when we had those quick appreciations in the past, we went down by 30% over here, for example. There are two ways to deal with this risk of betting on a falling price here. We could either just wait until the momentum dies down and then enter, or we could already enter right now and have a relatively tight stop loss. And if the rally continues, we just get stopped out and then enter with the next resistance and then hope we turn around. If we don't turn around, we just get stopped out again, and then we enter one more time. The art here is to have the right position sizing, that we don't blow our entire portfolio if we get stopped out once, but to then make it back again with the next bet or the bet thereafter by increasing our position size, but also by tightening our stop loss. So, that's what I personally do with NEAR.

[00:12:43]I'm watching it closely. I'm considering to open a short soon. I don't have it open by the time of publishing of this video, but I have NEAR on my watch list and I'm waiting for a potential slowdown of this current rally. That's the kind of approach I follow for many altcoins.

[00:12:58]This here is my track record. It's 100% transparent. It's also down on the linked website in the pinned comment. We just closed a Luna Classic short, for example. That made 14.6%.

[00:13:11]Not every trade is a winner, by the way.

[00:13:13]On average, I have almost the same number of winning and losing trades.

[00:13:17]Still, the average trade makes on average 5.3%. That's because the winners tend to be larger than the losers. We want to limit our loss very quickly, and we want to keep our winners run. And so, this [clears throat] is where I believe this channel is different to most others you see here on YouTube. For example, here with those timestamps, there is a direct link to the announcement in Telegram. You can just cross-check every single thing. This here is a sell signal for Terra Luna Classic. In other words, I'm opening a short of Luna Classic versus Bitcoin and here is then the message where I closed that position.

[00:13:58]And we're using the moving averages as well to figure out when momentum turns around. We had our short squeeze, then the momentum slowed down, we got our death cross, we enter the short and then once we get the golden cross, that short squeeze might come to an end. And so, that's the kind of approach I'm now targeting for NEAR Protocol as well. I don't think that this rally will sustain because again, the whales are not accumulating the token on the Ethereum chain. The usage of the protocol over time is not going up and we still have a supply that grows over time much quicker than Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana.

[00:14:36]Couple that with a lot of media attention, a lot of artificial hype and we've got something that's likely going to turn around at one point again. In the worst case, it went down by 85% versus the rest of the old coin market over here or recently, we have that 80% drop. We don't have to find winners in this market. We just have to figure out what's the most likely direction from here. That's a playbook that worked very well for me that continues to work and again, I'm very public about it all. All of those trades are linked to the Telegram messages. All of this can be easily verified and that's where I believe this channel is different. Most people are not willing to share that kind of data. If it's your first time here, feel free to subscribe. I publish here regularly. A like would be very much appreciated as well. It helps the channel grow. See you next time here on YouTube or see you on premium. There's also a 7-day money-back guarantee for premium in case you don't like it. Just message me within the first week and I'll refund you, no questions asked.

[00:15:34]Link to premium pops up here on the screen. See you next time. Cheers.