NEAR Protocol’s Q3 2025 Surge: $3.3B Market Cap & DeFi Boom Defies Crypto Winter
NEAR Protocol just flexed its resilience—and Wall Street’s still sleeping on it.
DeFi on Fire
The blockchain’s Q3 report reveals a $3.3 billion market cap, with decentralized finance activity exploding like a meme coin on leverage. No fluff—just protocol-level adoption.
The Quiet Outperformer
While TradFi analysts obsess over Fed rate cuts, NEAR’s ecosystem quietly onboarded more devs than a Silicon Valley hackathon. Tokenomics? Actually working—unlike half the ‘institutional-grade’ projects VCs dumped last cycle.
Cynical Take
Let’s see if the suits ‘discover’ NEAR just in time to take credit—after calling crypto dead for the 47th time.
NEAR Protocol ended Q3 2025 with notable progress in positioning itself as a key blockchain for cross-chain swaps and AI integration. According to Messari’s quarterly report, NEAR achieved a 24.3% increase in market cap, climbing to $3.3 billion while maintaining its 17th global ranking. The token price rose 22.3% to $2.6 by quarter’s end.
Despite overall market volatility, the network’s ecosystem expansion remained steady. The network processed $234.9 million in volume through NEAR Intents, emphasizing its growing adoption in decentralized exchanges and interoperability solutions.
Messari highlighted the network’s ongoing effort to serve as a hub for AI-powered decentralized applications under its “Blockchain for AI” initiative, which continues to attract new developers and ecosystem partners.
The protocol’s AI focus gained further momentum with NEAR.ai, which supports projects like AI Research Hub and AI Assistant. Over 940 NEAR agents were deployed in Q3, signaling increasing engagement from the developer community.
NEAR’s Market Strength Offsets Slower Network Activity
Despite solid market indicators, the network’s on-chain data indicated a moderate deceleration. The revenue decreased by 0.8% from the previous quarter to $805,614, mainly due to a decrease in the total transaction value. The average transaction cost slightly increased by 13.2% to $0.0019, thereby arresting a two-consecutive quarters’ fall.
The level of active use decreased as the number of daily addresses reduced by 9.8% to 2.9 million, while daily transactions decreased by 14.2% to 4.7 million. Nevertheless, the project has continued to work on optimizing tokenomics and fees. This includes 70% being burned as fees, as well as 30% being paid to contract creators.
The decrease in the inflation rate for the network from 5% to 2.5% supported by 90% of the validators, was a huge step in making the token more sustainable. The update took the FORM of a protocol upgrade.
DeFi Ecosystem Grows 17% QoQ Driven by Rhea Finance
Development activities on the team continued to be quite strong in the areas of protocol improvement and DeFi ecosystem development. In fact, two significant updates, namely Nearcore v2.7.0 and v2.8.0, were implemented, which improved shard, validator, and overall system scalability.
Rhea Finance continued as the foremost DeFi solution in the ecosystem, boasting 96.6% TVL of $162.5 million, a 17% increase QoQ. The total liquid staking TVL saw a 28.5% increase to $174.5 million, consisting of Meta Pool adding 97.8 million and LiNEAR Protocol adding 74 million.
