NEAR's Price Surge Linked to Zcash Interest, but Rally Not Yet Losing Steam
Crypto analytics platform Santiment has been examining NEAR's recent price surge of 81% between September 13 and 20. The analysis notes that while the move is no longer in its early stages, it hasn't yet seen a strong exhaustion signal in the data.
The rise is linked to the privacy-focused interest recently concentrated around Zcash, with NEAR emerging as a new candidate in this theme. This coincided with the launch of a privacy-focused perpetual futures product on September 17.
Santiment points out that the 119% increase in dollar-denominated open interest may be misleading. This is because the dollar value of these positions also grows when the asset's price rises, which means new money didn't necessarily enter the market at the same rate or the number of traders increased by that much.
The platform's chart shows that during this week, the increase in position size in terms of the number of tokens was more limited. Additionally, funding data suggests that the rally is not yet losing steam, as the funding rate reached 1.6 times the median of the past two months on September 20.