In a bold projection for the current market cycle, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has stated that Near Protocol’s native token, NEAR, possesses the technical and narrative momentum to grow 20x by 2027. Speaking on The Rollup podcast, the Maelstrom Chief Investment Officer laid out a comprehensive macro thesis anchoring NEAR alongside privacy-focused digital assets.
Hayes argued that global macroeconomic shifts and escalating government spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure are driving a renewed demand for sovereign, cryptographically private financial networks. Within this landscape, Near Protocol has emerged as a critical structural beneficiary due to its unique technical architecture.
The Power of Cross-Chain Intents and AI Agent Infrastructure
According to Hayes, the primary driver for NEAR’s exponential upside rests on its Confidential Intents framework. The infrastructure allows users and autonomous AI agents to move value seamlessly and privately across distinct blockchain protocols without navigating complex bridging mechanisms, maintaining multiple wallets, or suffering from fragmented liquidity.
This interoperability standard directly solves the historic usability constraints of legacy privacy networks. By leveraging NEAR Intents, market participants can execute anonymous transfers originating from shielded Zcash (ZEC) balances and settle them into mainstream stablecoins like USDT across alternative networks. This functionality bridges isolated privacy ecosystems with the broader digital asset economy, positioning NEAR as the execution layer for private web3 commerce.
Furthermore, this setup natively supports the expansion of autonomous AI applications, allowing software agents to independently manage portfolios, query balances, and execute low-latency, cross-chain transactions securely. NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin noted during the same broadcast that confidential enterprise operations, such as corporate payroll distribution, are fundamentally impossible on fully transparent public ledgers, making programmable privacy a prerequisite for institutional mass adoption.
Historic Technical Fractals and the Path to $4.00
The sudden spotlight on NEAR follows a massive contrarian rally, with the token gaining over 90% since Hayes first highlighted it as a core speculative holding in early May. This market outperformance occurs against a broader cooling period for major crypto assets and is heavily reinforced by a localized technical breakout on the daily charts.
Market analysts have noted that NEAR’s current price action strongly resembles its 2023–2024 accumulation and recovery fractal. During that historical cycle, the asset established a firm floor in the $0.91 to $0.99 range before exploding into a 250% vertical rally. In mid-2026, NEAR successfully rebounded from that exact same support zone, backed by aggressive buying pressure that pushed its daily Relative Strength Index (RSI) to a highly bullish reading of 88.
Adding to the bullish continuation setup, NEAR has confirmed a “golden cross” on high-timeframe charts, a classic momentum indicator where the shorter-term 50-day exponential moving average (EMA) crosses decisively above the longer-term 200-day EMA. Traders are watching the immediate overhead resistance cluster sitting between $3.38 and $4.00. Reclaiming the $4.00 threshold would validate the historic fractal, opening a clear technical path toward the $9.00 to $10.00 liquidity targets later in the year, while a failure to clear this near-term resistance could prompt a retracement back toward the key moving averages.
