As NEAR Protocol Price Falls Below $5, New AI Meme Coin Raises $7.4 Million
The $NEAR token underpinning NEAR Protocol—a scalable alternative to high-functionality smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana—has dropped back below $5 after briefly crossing the important threshold in the early hours of July 12.
$NEAR trades at $4.79, about 0.4% lower than it was 24 hours ago, but a bullish 19.2% up from its price this time last Friday.
$NEAR weathered the overnight downturn better than its biggest Layer 1 rivals. Both market leaders Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) dropped 2.1% in the last 24 hours to trade at respective prices of $57,036 and $3,063.
Neither kept pace with $NEAR’s intraweek gains. Bitcoin grew about 5.7% over the seven days while Ethereum grew about 8%.
Solana ($SOL) faced stiffer overnight losses of 5.4% than the leaders, but beat them both, adding 10% to its value over the week.
NEAR Protocol is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network that achieves greater scalability than its biggest rivals thanks to sharding, a process that splits the network’s transactions into smaller “shards” that give computers hosting the network only a fraction of the transactions they would have to process otherwise.
This leads to cheaper gas fees and a larger throughput. For comparison, NEAR claims to have a maximum theoretical throughput of 100,000 transactions per second (tps), which easily pips Ethereum’s maximum theoretical 119 tps and Solana’s 65,000 tps.
Recently, Near Protocol has followed the market downturn, although holders were worse hit than Bitcoin fans. Back in late May, the $NEAR token was trading above $8, but it has been in decline since, bottoming out at around $4 last Friday, which is where it has found some support, as shown by the green line.
Still, recovery will be an uphill struggle
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