NEAR's token surged over 30% to a six-month high after the BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom CIO grouped it alongside Hyperliquid and Zcash as his top altcoin picks, even as broader markets softened.
The rally over the past few days sent NEAR above $2.30 before the token stabilized around $2.22–$2.24. It has since climbed further: at press time, NEAR trades at approximately $2.39, per CoinMarketCap data, representing a 58% gain over the past seven days and a 69% gain over the past month. The move was all the more conspicuous given the broader market context: NEAR printed green candles while Bitcoin and most majors treaded water or fell over the same stretch, with Hyperliquid and ZEC, Hayes' other two picks, also rallying but failing to match NEAR's magnitude.
The 'holy trinity' thesis
When you are in position, trading is easy, sit back and watch number go up. $HYPE , $ZEC , $NEAR the holy trinity!
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) May 22, 2026
Hayes' selection of tokens map to a distinct infrastructure thesis: Hyperliquid represents high-performance decentralized trading, Zcash brings privacy features, and NEAR handles scalability.
The endorsement carried extra weight given the market context. Hayes runs Maelstrom, his family office fund, and has a documented track record of moving tokens with his public calls.
What NEAR has going for it beyond Hayes
The AI narrative has been a consistent tailwind. NEAR's ecosystem now includes an AI Agent Market and a confidential GPU marketplace — integrations that have drawn retail and institutional interest alike.
More concretely, NEAR is scheduled for a significant protocol upgrade in June 2026 ( network upgrade 2.13 ) that introduces dynamic resharding. Unlike static sharding models, dynamic resharding automatically provisions new shards as network demand grows, without requiring governance votes or manual intervention. The theoretical ceiling for throughput scales with demand rather than pre-determined parameters.
On the institutional side, Grayscale filed in January 2026 to convert its NEAR Trust into a spot ETF — ticker GSNR — a process currently pending SEC approval. A spot ETF listing would open NEAR to traditional investors who want exposure without dealing with wallets or crypto exchanges.
NEAR is also implementing post-quantum security measures, a response to growing concern about quantum computing's long-term threat to existing cryptographic standards.
What to watch
The June resharding rollout and the SEC's decision timeline on the GSNR ETF application are the two most concrete near-term catalysts. BitMEX-era veterans like Hayes have a track record of generating short-term volatility around their calls — the question is whether NEAR's underlying infrastructure story is substantial enough to sustain it.
