On Friday (April 8), the price of the $NEAR token is trading around $18.32, up over 19% in the last 24-hour period. In this article, we examine some potential reasons for this strong performance.
What Is Near Protocol ($NEAR)?
Here is what Binance Research said about NEAR back in October 2020:
“NEAR Protocol is a decentralized application platform designed to make apps similarly usable to those on today’s web. The network runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Nightshade, which aims to provide dynamic scalability and stabilizes fees.
“NEAR is the native utility token of the network and has the following utility:
- Fees for processing transactions and storing data.
- To run a validator node on the network via staking NEAR tokens.
- Used for governance votes to determine how network resources are allocated and where the protocol’s future technical direction will go.“
NEAR’s Latest Funding Round
On Wednesday (April 6), the NEAR Foundation announced that it had raised $350 million in its latest funding round, which comes less than three months after it announced the close of a $150 million funding round led by Three Arrows Capital.
As The Block reported, this $350 million round was “led by Tiger Global, with participation from Republic Capital, Hashed, FTX Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, and others.”
John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement:
“NEAR is poised to be a leading smart contract blockchain platform, combining first-rate technology with a fast-growing developer ecosystem. We’re excited to support NEAR as we ramp up our investments in the digital asset space.“
NEAR’s March Town Hall Highlights
Yesterday (April 7), the NEAR team published a blog post, in which it said that in Q1 2022, “the NEAR Foundation saw an explosion of activity in the ecosystem.”
Apparently, NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament offered these interesting numbers from the NEAR community in her opening remarks:
“Through March, the NEAR community has onboarded 40,000 students and 120 NEAR-certified teachers, while grants grew to $124 million in funds spread across 509 recipients. The ecosystem also grew from 300 to 429 projects and DAOs, 110 million transactions (up from 95 million in February), and 5.2 million wallets—a growth of 1 million wallets in a single month.”
$NEAR’s Price Action and What Crypto Analysts Are Saying About It
According to data by TradingView, on crypto exchange Binance, the $NEAR price got as high as $19.71 at 7:18 a.m. UTC on April 8, which is not far off the all-time high price of $20.44 reached on January 16 (i.e. three days after Q1 2022’s $150 million funding round was announced).
Currently (as of 11:30 a.m. UTC), $NEAR is trading around $18.44, up 20.28% in the past 24-hour period.
Pseudonymous crypto analyst “Altcoin Sherpa” told his 172K Twitter followers:
And another analyst (“Xeusthegreat“) told his 15K Twitter followers:
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
Image Credit
Featured Image by “Simon” via Pixabay
