Monday morning’s standout performer in crypto was not bitcoin. NEAR climbed roughly 23% to sit just above $4, and the catalyst has very little to do with the NEAR token on its own.
The rally can be traced back to NEAR Intents, a swap service that runs on the NEAR blockchain. It allows a wallet to exchange one token for another across separate chains without first shuffling funds between them. It is the sort of plumbing nobody pays attention to until it begins moving serious volume.
Serious volume is exactly what it is moving now. Large consumer wallets including ZODL and Vizor have wired NEAR Intents in to provide ZEC swaps, and the daily ZEC volume passing through the service rose sixfold over the past week. NEAR has turned into the routing layer for one of the market’s most actively traded tokens, and its native token has tracked that traffic higher.
ZEC itself barely moved
This is the detail worth dwelling on. ZEC, the token behind all of that swap demand, added only 3% to trade just above $1,500. It was the infrastructure beneath it that absorbed the larger repricing.
Anyone holding either asset should keep an eye on that pattern. When a chain becomes the conduit for someone else’s trading rush, the conduit can run ahead of what actually flows through it, at least for a week or so.
Bitcoin adds to the tokenized-stock rally
Bitcoin was changing hands just above $81,000 during Monday’s Asian morning hours, less than 1% higher over 24 hours. On its own that is a muted print, but it builds on the gains bitcoin has logged since Thursday, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened the door to onchain trading of tokenized U.S. stocks.
Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at exchange BTSE, attributed the weekend’s bitcoin jump to that SEC ruling and the short squeeze it set off. Beyond commentary from Federal Reserve officials, he sees little on this week’s calendar.
“I’d expect more volatility in the last few weeks leading up to that event,” Mei said, referring to the Fed’s late-October meeting. That leaves over a month of speeches plus a single inflation reading to reshape positioning before then.
The rest of the majors
Beyond NEAR, the board was largely green but uneventful. BNB gained 2% to approach $777. Ether and HYPE each added about 2%.
XRP, DOGE, SOL and TRX were up 1% or less. Nothing in that cluster points to fresh capital chasing a story; it looks more like drift following bitcoin’s weekend move.
Equities set the tone
Through the Asian session, crypto followed the lead of equities. MSCI’s Asia Pacific index rose nearly 1%, with technology shares in South Korea and Taiwan out front. The gains came after U.S. officials characterised talks with China as “very successful” ahead of this week’s summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
S&P 500 futures added less than 1%, with Nasdaq 100 contracts slightly ahead of that. Brent crude slipped 2% to just above $101 a barrel, a fourth consecutive decline, which cooled inflation concerns and gave Treasury futures a lift.
Lower oil prices and a warmer U.S.-China backdrop are the type of macro tailwinds that tend to keep risk assets supported without any crypto-specific trigger. That squares with bitcoin’s behaviour: not much movement, but pointed the right way.
What to watch from here
The NEAR trade is the one with a clear, verifiable driver. Should ZEC swap volume via NEAR Intents keep rising, the routing-layer thesis stands. Should it taper off, a 23% one-day move resting on a single week of traffic leaves plenty of room for a pullback.
On bitcoin, Mei’s take is the practical one: a thin week, followed by a build-up into the Fed’s late-October meeting where speeches and one inflation print will do the heavy lifting. Once the squeeze has run its course, do not count on the tokenized-stock narrative to carry the price by itself.