NEAR, the native token of the Near Protocol Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, hit its highest level in a month after breaking a previous downtrend that saw the token hit a low of $4 on July 5. Currently trading at $5.93, NEAR has seen a significant augment of 20% over the past week, which has allowed it to rise to 19th position among Top 100 Cryptocurrencies.
This positive trend caught the attention of venture capital firm Pantera Capital, whose Managing Partner, Paul Veradittakit, shared some of the reasons why the firm is bullish on the NEAR protocol and its growth potential.
A scalability solution to the challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum
Veraditatakit took to social media on Thursday to attraction NEAR’s value proposition in the blockchain ecosystem.
Veradistakit noted that while Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) were at the forefront of the “revolution” in cryptocurrency technology, Bitcoin has become a store of value, and Ethereum supports shrewd contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), both face transaction scalability “challenges.”
According to MP Pantera, this is where the NEAR protocol plays a key role in solving scalability issues while prioritizing developer engagement and user experience, offering a scalable and user-centric blockchain solution.
NEAR stands out with its Thresholded Proof of Stake (TPoS) system and Nightshade sharding, which increases scalability and decentralization. These advancements paved the way for NEAR to achieve significant milestones, such as reaching $335 million in Total value locked (TVL), an augment of 547% in just six months.
According to Veradittakit, such growth demonstrates NEAR’s traction and strategic effectiveness in the market. Furthermore, NEAR’s market presence is reinforced by key metrics, including a 42% quarter-on-quarter augment in daily energetic addresses, an augment in transactions from 35 million to over 220 million, and a significant augment in monthly energetic users from 2.9 million to 15 million.
NEAR and Crypto AI Integration
It is worth noting that NEAR is also positioning itself as a leader in the emerging cryptocurrency sector. artificial intelligence An artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem that has gained significant popularity, especially in the last year, due to the rise of companies such as Nvidia.
The NEAR team has placed an emphasis on integrating AI through an open and decentralized framework that prioritizes user control over data and resources.
This gained recognition as NEAR was announced as part of the Grayscale AI fund. The fund’s constituent assets and weightings include Bittensor at 2.92%, Filecoin at 30.59%, Livepeer at 8.64%, NEAR at 32.99%, and Render at 24.86%.
Finally, Veradttakit emphasized that NEAR’s success can be attributed to the leadership of its co-founders, Illya Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov, as Polosukhin’s expertise in AI and Skidanov’s engineering knowledge played a “key role” in developing NEAR’s infrastructure.
Despite hitting a monthly high of $5.93 and posting a significant 300% year-on-year augment, the token will need to break above $8.28 in the near term to break out of the downtrend structure.
However, with these advances and the adoption of AI-related tokens, NEAR could be poised for further gains throughout the year, aided by a broader market recovery.
Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView.com
