With cryptocurrency markets seeing bearish momentum today, most coins registered single-digit percent price drops. However, with all the blood in the market, NEAR Protocol’s price increased by over 36% in the past week. What is NEAR, and why is the price rising? Let’s find out.

What Is NEAR Protocol?

NEAR describes itself as a collective, a foundation, and a development platform built on a new layer-one blockchain. According to its official website:

“The NEAR Foundation (“NF”) is a unique kind of organization.  It helped to launch both a technological platform — the NEAR Protocol — and the ecosystem around it.”

NEAR’s vision is to provide a self-sufficient ecosystem for developers, creators, entrepreneurs, and community members. NEAR has dozens of projects already on the platform, including various DAOs and Guilds.

The organizations on NEAR are meant to bootstrap developers and creators looking to get their foot in the door with NFTs, Metaverse, and Web3. There are Design guilds, Curators DAO, Hackathon Guilds, and much more.

Why Is NEAR Price Rising?

Last week has been filled with announcements for NEAR Protocol. On December 9th, NAKSH, a new Indian NFT platform, launched on NEAR. NAKSH is an NFT marketplace fueled by skilled artists looking to build a community that will restore the Indian traditional art market.

In other news, several social DAO projects are building on NEAR after their $800 million global ecosystem funding initiative that NEAR launched in October. DAO’s like Astro, Feiyu, and Reality Chain all focus on the social aspects of Web3 and the Metaverse and are looking to create a social Metaverse accessible to everyone.

Last but not least, yesterday, NEAR announced a $50,000 grant to Inite to build an NFT-based gaming platform. According to the official announcement:

“Inite is the source of ideas’ light. We are a bold, brand new Metaverse game that boosts users’ creativity in a play-to-earn mode.”

There’s no doubt that exploring the Metaverse and Web3 sectors is the right decision for NEAR. The Metaverse and GameFi trends are expected to continue into next year, and any projects currently exploring and developing blockchain-based VR and gaming platforms can expect to continue to see bullish momentum.

At the time of writing, NEAR is trading at $9.41, up over 36% in the past week. Its market cap is $5.4 billion, placing it as the 29th largest blockchain on the market. Its 24-hour trading volume is $344 million, with a circulating supply of 575 million tokens.

You can purchase NEAR on Binance, Huobi Global, KuCoin, Crypto.com, Bitfinex, and more.

As the NEAR ecosystem continues to expand, we can expect to see its market cap increase. The current valuation of $5.4 billion is quite large, but compared to similar platforms like Polkadot, Solana, and Polygon, NEAR still has a lot of room for growth.

Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency.

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