NEAR Protocol Surges 20% With Long Positions Dominant

The NEAR Protocol, a sharded proof-of-stake blockchain, witnessed a 20% price surge on Wednesday. Based on data from CoinGecko, the NEAR Protocol’s NEAR token is trading at $2.88 at press time.

NEAR has spiked almost 30% over the last week. Currently, NEAR Protocol boasts a market capitalization of approximately $2.89 billion, with a circulating supply of 1 billion NEAR tokens.

NEAR sees increased investor interest

The token has shown varied performance across different time frames. In the past hour, NEAR has remained muted. Over the year, NEAR has almost doubled in value. However, NEAR Protocol reached its all-time high of $20.44 nearly two years ago in January 2022, still 86% below its record peak.

This notable increase in NEAR’s price reflects growing investor interest and active participation in the market.

NEAR Protocol’s derivatives on Coinglass reveal the long/short ratio over the past 24 hours stands over 1, indicating a slightly stronger inclination towards long positions.

Moreover, the volume of NEAR has surged over 300%, reaching $1.27 billion in the derivatives market. Concurrently, the open interest, which indicates the total number of outstanding derivative contracts, has increased by 40%, amounting to $144.70 million. This data reflects overall positive sentiment in the market.

However, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) also reveals an overbought momentum close to 72. This means that NEAR may be getting overvalued and could be primed for a trend reversal or corrective pullback in price.

In the past week, NEAR Protocol entered into a strategic partnership with US-based IDS Inc. ANI reported that the partnership is expected to boost the development of the Bharat Blockchain Network.

Previously, in November, the NEAR Foundation announced a partnership with Polygon Labs to focus on developing zkWASM, a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for WASM blockchains. This collaboration reportedly combines Polygon Labs’ expertise in zero-knowledge research and the NEAR Foundation’s knowledge of WASM WebAssembly technology for zkWASM prover.