10 December was quite a gloomy day for the crypto market. Almost all the coins had registered losses and were seen trading in the red. Fast-forward, 24-hours later, the market is still recovering from the dip’s after-effects. In fact, at the time of this analysis, the global crypto market cap merely reflected a value of $2.23 million – down by 1.5% when compared to 10 December.
Despite the broader market dump and collective bearish sentiment, NEAR protocol’s native token has been able to post green numbers and fetch gains to its investors. Over the past week, the #29 ranked token has appreciated by close to 40%.
All sunshine and rainbows
Well, defying the broader trend is never easy. To do so, it is quite crucial to have the support and backing of members of the community. NEAR has been quite fortunate on this front. Its social sentiment has been quite strong, of late.
People from the space have been vocal about the token on social platforms. The same was evidenced by Santiment’s social volume and social dominance metrics.
In fact, the positive [bullish] sentiment has successfully been able to overshadow the negative [bearish] sentiment on all channels over time. The same more or less highlights the collective-community confidence with respect to this project.
Source: Santiment
Further, the development activity of the NEAR protocol is currently at its peak. In fact, as per data from ProofofGitHub, NEAR’s activity over the past day has been even more impressive than the likes of Solana and IOTA. In effect, it stood #5 on the rankings chart, only below Cardano, Polkadot, Kusama, and Ethereum.
Well, at this stage it is important to note that NEAR protocol is L1 blockchain designed to provide an ideal environment for dApps to thrive. Simply put, it is a community-run cloud computing platform with a fairly high transaction throughput.
It has been able to achieve the same using its ‘Nightshade’ technology – a variation of sharding. Relative to regular sharding, shards in Nightshade produce a fraction of the next block called chunks. By doing so, NEAR has been able to achieve up to 100k transactions per second, which is comparatively better than a host of other protocols in the space.
Thus, developers are fervently contributing to the project, to a large extent. It shields the future prospects of this protocol.
Source: Santiment
All this, in effect, has managed to rub off positively on the token’s price. NEAR’s profits have improved with time and its returns to HODLers have been quite lively of late.
As per data from Messari, this token has appreciated by over 1034% in the past year. Additionally, it has been able to provide HODLers with staking yields close to 12%. Thus, there’s enough incentive for new investors to enter into the NEAR market at this point.
Source: Messari
NEAR’s growth has evidently not been forced. It has, by and large, been phased, seamless and organic. So, at this stage, there’s nothing much for token HODLers to worry about.
