Near Protocol (NEAR) is among the top-performing cryptocurrencies today, surging 5% despite criticism from DFINITY founder Dominic Williams. At press time, NEAR is trading at $5.29, driven by recent ecosystem developments, including over 1 million NEAR tokens staked using its decentralized AI framework, NEAR AI. This staking mechanism allows users to pay for private AI compute and secure agent slots.
The protocol has also seen significant general staking activity, with Bitwise reporting that 596 million NEAR tokens, or 46% of the total supply, are currently staked. This staking ratio has remained consistent over the last three quarters, even as the staking yield was reduced by nearly 50% to 4.87%. Additionally, Near recently launched Near Business, a confidential multi-sig treasury for businesses, supporting payments, swaps, and capital allocations across more than 35 chains. Near Intents transactional volume has reached $35.60 billion, marking a 14.6x year-over-year increase.
However, DFINITY founder Dominic Williams has raised doubts about Near’s Confidential Intents architecture. In a recent post, he claimed that a review by a PhD graduate suggested the privacy feature runs on a separate instance of the protocol called FAR, operated by unknown centralized nodes and not open source. Williams implied that the network could be an overpromised Web3 project. Some supporters agreed with his skepticism, while critics compared DFINITY’s Internet Computer (ICP) to Near’s better performance. At press time, ICP was trading at $2.90, more than 99% below its launch price.
Others dismissed Williams’ comments as a marketing strategy aimed at attacking the competition. The debate highlights the ongoing tensions and differing perspectives within the cryptocurrency community regarding the legitimacy and effectiveness of various blockchain technologies.