NEAR Price Struggles Amid Ecosystem Progress
The NEAR price has been struggling to keep up with its ecosystem's development. After reaching $3.05 in early June, it dropped below $2.00 by late July, reflecting broader crypto market weakness. Despite this, the protocol continues to make progress, with infrastructure finally showing results.
Nansen reported that NEAR Protocol entered Q2 2026 with its core infrastructure already in place, and usage has remained relatively stable throughout the quarter. Dynamic resharding has improved network efficiency by automatically splitting congested shards and merging underused ones without governance intervention. The upcoming SPICE upgrade aims to further improve performance with 200ms block times, sub-second finality, and parallel execution.
Privacy adoption is also growing, with Confidential Intents TVL exceeding $30 million during Q2, while 42% of Near.com swap volume was executed privately by default. Distribution expanded as well, with SimpleSwap integrating NEAR Intents across a platform serving 10 million users and over 2,800 assets.