NEAR continued its infrastructure and on-chain application expansion in the second quarter, but its token price did not rise in tandem. The token briefly rose to $3.05 in early June before falling below $2 in late July. The article argues that this is more indicative of a weakening overall crypto market than a stagnation in protocol development.

Infrastructure enters the realization phase

According to on-chain data agency Nansen, NEAR's core infrastructure will be largely in place by the start of Q2 2026. Rather than continuing to deploy new technologies, the market is more focused on whether these facilities will begin to generate quantifiable usage, privacy transaction adoption rates, and protocol revenue.

NEAR's dynamic resharding is pushing the network towards more resilient execution capabilities. This mechanism automatically splits shards when congested and merges them when insufficient, without requiring governance intervention. Meanwhile, NEAR is also advancing SPICE upgrades, aiming for 200-millisecond block times, sub-second final confirmation, and parallel execution capabilities to support AI workloads requiring continuous settlement.

Expanded scope of privacy transactions and distribution

Privacy features were another key focus in the second quarter. Nansen data shows that the total value locked in Confidential Intents has exceeded $30 million, and 42% of exchange transactions on Near.com are executed in privacy mode by default.

• SimpleSwap has integrated NEAR Intents, and the platform covers approximately 10 million users.
• The platform supports the exchange of over 2,800 types of assets.
• Ledger has integrated Intents-based exchange functionality across more than 30 blockchains.

On-chain activity remains stable

Despite the pressure on token prices, usage on the NEAR chain did not weaken significantly in the second quarter. Nansen mentioned that the network averaged approximately 854,000 transactions per day, with approximately 121,000 active addresses per day, and over 1 million Tether-related transactions.

In terms of specific applications, HOT Wallet remains one of the most active wallets for transactions, while Ref Finance continues to be a significant DeFi protocol within the NEAR ecosystem. Overall, on-chain data performance is relatively stable, indicating that user activity and token price movements are not entirely synchronized.

Entering the third quarter, market focus remains on whether NEAR can further translate its scaling, privacy, and cross-chain infrastructure into stronger revenue performance and token-level feedback. Whether ecosystem progress can drive price recovery remains to be seen if overall market sentiment does not improve significantly.