NEAR is trading at $7.00, its highest level since May 2022, after rising by 20% in the past 24 hours.
Price action has been spurred by the NEAR founder's attendance as a speaker at Nvidia's AI conference next week.
NEAR will soon introduce Near Tasks, a new product focused on AI.

Layer-1 blockchain NEAR's native token (NEAR) has almost doubled since March 5 as the hype surrounding Nvidia's (NVDA) upcoming annual conference continues to drive AI-related tokens to the upside.

Near Protocol co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin will be on a panel at the conference titled "Transforming AI" and will be hosted by Nvidia's founder and CEO Jensen Huang. His attendance and the upcoming release of Near Tasks, an artificial intelligence (AI) facet of the business, has sparked discussion over whether NEAR will work closely with Nvidia in the future. The company seems to be only crypto-related firm that will be presenting at the main panel.

Near's gains are mirrored across the crypto AI market, with the likes of fetch.ai (FET), the graph (GRT) and singularityNET (AGIX) all posting gains of more than 30% over the past week, according to CoinMarketCap. The CoinDesk 20 index (CD20) has risen by 9.18% in the same period.

The surge has also been buoyed by bitcoin recording a record high of $72,446 on Monday.

Adding to the bullish sentiment, crypto venture capital firm DeFiance Capital's CEO Arthur Cheong wrote on a social media post that "the future is NEAR" on Monday after the token rose by an additional 20% to $7.00, its highest level since May, 2022. On March 5, it was trading at $3.60

The company started as NEAR.AI in 2017, an AI company that had nothing to do with blockchain. The team began building the NEAR protocol in 2018, and the mainnet was rolled out in 2020. Prior to starting Near, Polosukhin was at Google Research, where he worked on developing models and tools that would eventually feed into AI.

Near is a proof-of-stake blockchain that relies on a consensus protocol called Nightshade, which allows Near to operate at about 100,000 transactions per second, and process a block a second. The token currently has a market cap of $7.45 billion, according to CoinDesk data.

Near Near foundation Near protocol Nvidia AI

Oliver Knight

Oliver Knight joined CoinDesk as a news reporter in April 2022. Before joining CoinDesk, Knight was the Chief Reporter at Coin Rivet for three years. Having graduated with a journalism degree from Birmingham City University, Knight went on to work at various sports publications before diving into the world of Bitcoin in 2014. He does not have any crypto holdings.

Aoyon Ashraf

Aoyon Ashraf is CoinDesk's managing editor for Breaking News. He spent almost a decade at Bloomberg covering equities, commodities and tech. Prior to that, he spent several years on the sellside, financing small-cap companies. Aoyon graduated from University of Toronto with a degree in mining engineering. He holds ETH and BTC, as well as ALGO, ADA, SOL, OP and some other altcoins which are below CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.