NEAR Protocol was the strongest performer among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies on Sunday evening. On our own query of the CoinGecko interface on September 27, 2026 at 22:49 UTC, NEAR stands
NEAR Protocol was the strongest performer among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies on Sunday evening. On our own query of the CoinGecko interface on September 27, 2026 at 22:49 UTC, NEAR stands at $5.42, or €4.77, a gain of 9.73 percent over 24 hours and of 29.23 percent over seven days. The trigger is well documented and has little to do with price speculation: the asset manager Ondo Finance launched tokenised US equities, ETFs and commodity products on the NEAR blockchain on September 22, and in parallel a growing share of Zcash trading is running through the NEAR Intents swap layer.
What that means for you in Germany comes further down: tokenised equities fall under securities law, the MiCA crypto regulation does not cover them, and on tax the legal structure decides whether the one-year holding period applies or the flat withholding tax. First the numbers, with source and timestamp.
All price figures in this section come from our own query of the public CoinGecko interface on September 27, 2026 at 22:49 UTC. NEAR trades at $5.42. The 24-hour high was $5.57, the low $4.94; the range of a single day therefore comes to around 12 percent of the price. Market capitalisation stands at $7.09 billion, rank 21 in the overall market. Over the same period, NEAR worth $1.42 billion changed hands.
The longer windows explain why this asset is turning up everywhere right now: up 132.18 percent over 14 days and up 200.95 percent over 30 days. The price has tripled within a month. At the same time it sits 73.5 percent below the all-time high of $20.44, reached on January 16, 2022. Both figures belong together when you size up a position.
One detail that many altcoins lack: circulating supply is 1.3074 billion NEAR against a total supply of 1.3074 billion. Virtually no locked allocation remains that could reach the market over the coming months and dilute the price. New units arise through the protocol's ongoing issuance; large lock-ups expiring play no part here.
Several trade publications reported weekly gains of around 78 to 80 percent last week, among them a report of September 21 that put NEAR at $5.41. Those figures are accurate; they simply measure a different window, namely the week to September 21, which held the steepest stretch of the move. The 29.23 percent quoted here cover the seven days to September 27, 22:49 UTC. Anyone reading percentages on a fast-moving asset should therefore look for the cut-off date before comparing them.
The primary source is the Ondo Finance announcement of September 22, 2026. According to it, Ondo Stocks is live on the NEAR mainnet and starts with 20 assets. It names tokenised US equities such as Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, alongside ETF and commodity-linked products, among them the Nasdaq 100 ETF QQQ as well as silver and gold products. Ondo puts its own platform at more than $1 billion in assets under custody and more than $26 billion in cumulative trading volume.
Individual reports recently carried considerably higher figures, up to $10 billion. That spread cannot be resolved from the outside, because several different definitions are in circulation; the reliable figure is the provider's own. In case of doubt, the lower number published by the provider applies.
Technically, access runs through the network's swap layer instead of a dedicated exchange front end. According to Ondo the assets are reachable via NEAR Intents and are passed on from there to any connected wallet, app or chain. The announcement speaks of eligible users in supported jurisdictions. Which countries those are is not stated. Whether Germany is among them could not be established from the announcement, and that is the most important open question in this analysis.
In legal terms a tokenised equity share hardly ever qualifies as a share. As a rule it is a claim against an issuer who deposits the real share on your behalf. Three things change for you as a result: you hold no voting rights, you additionally carry the default risk of the issuer and the custodian, and the dividend only reaches you if the issuer passes it on. The distinction sounds academic, yet in the worst case it decides what you are actually holding.
Equities, ETFs and commodities as tokens: what sits on the chain is a claim against an issuer, not a bar in a vault.
NEAR Intents is the reason this network has been appearing in volume statistics for weeks. The definition in one sentence: an intent is a declaration in which you set out what you want to hold at the end, while a network of service providers works out the route there and competes on price. You specify only the outcome; the path across exchanges and bridges is left to the provider.
For the chain that has one tangible consequence. Every swap running through this layer creates activity on NEAR, even when neither the unit given up nor the one received is native to NEAR. The network earns from the intermediation. Ownership of the assets that change hands plays no part in it. That pattern is exactly what carries the current move.
The second driver comes from outside. On the same CoinGecko query of September 27, Zcash stands at $1,587, up 7.13 percent over seven days and up 99.57 percent over 30 days, rank 9 in the overall market. The privacy cryptocurrency has thereby created demand that has to be settled somewhere, and a growing share of it runs through NEAR Intents, because swapping there works without disclosing the counterparty.
A report of September 21 cites figures from the NEAR Intents explorer: cumulative volume of roughly $29.3 billion since launch and $842 million in the seven days before that date. The third-largest source of inflows over the preceding 24 hours was, according to that report, a wallet specialising in Zcash, with around $3.8 million across 458 transactions. Bitwise analyst Camran Khosravi, quoted in the same report, frames the two networks as complements: NEAR supplies Zcash holders with confidential infrastructure across chain boundaries and with access to liquidity.
A report of September 24 additionally cites analysis from the data platform Dune, according to which the number of confidential intents, at 113.2 million, exceeded the number of public ones, at 110.4 million, for the first time. Both figures come from press coverage rather than from our own measurement; the order of magnitude, however, matches what our own TVL query in the next section shows.
Confidential here means that the other side of the swap cannot see who stands opposite. It does not mean that your trading history disappears from view of the tax office. Every deposit and withdrawal on your exchange account is documented there, and reporting duties for providers apply regardless of how a swap was executed technically. Treating a confidential swap layer as a tool for concealment confuses two very different things.
cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 27, 2026. Method: retrieval of the historical chain TVL series for NEAR via the public DefiLlama interface on September 27 at around 22:51 UTC, evaluating the twelve daily values from September 16 to September 27, 2026.
The result: value deposited in applications on NEAR rises from $130.3 million on September 16 to $249.7 million on September 27. That is 91.6 percent in eleven days. The intermediate values form a staircase rather than a single jump: $167.8 million on September 18, $189.6 million on September 20, $204.3 million on September 23, $216.9 million on September 25, $231.5 million on September 26.
One discrepancy remains and is left unsmoothed. A report of September 24 cites the same data source for $191 million on September 18 and more than $350 million on September 25. Our own query returns $167.8 million and $216.9 million for those days. The difference most likely rests on a different definition, for instance on whether bridged holdings and liquid staking are counted in; that explanation cannot be proven. For your purposes the direction matters more than the third digit: deposited value has almost doubled in a little over a week, and that is the substructure of the price move.
What could not be established is how much of this increase falls directly to Ondo Stocks, and whether the inflows are durable or follow incentives. The network's incentive programme continues to run in parallel; the public data does not currently allow a clean separation of the two effects.
Confidential routing means the swap takes place while the counterparty cannot identify it; the tax office is unaffected by that.
Here lies the difference between an interesting headline and something you can act on. Tokenised equities and ETFs are not crypto assets within the meaning of the European MiCA regulation. That regulation expressly excludes financial instruments as defined by the MiFID II markets directive from its scope. Whatever represents a share therefore stays inside securities law, where different requirements apply: prospectus obligations, authorisation of the provider, investor protection rules.
In practice that means a crypto exchange registered in Germany under MiCA is still a long way from being allowed to sell you tokenised Apple shares. And a provider issuing such products outside the EU to eligible users is not automatically addressing you. Before you click anything, you therefore establish first whether the provider serves Germany at all and which supervisory authority it answers to. If you would rather take the regulated route via a supervised trading platform, you will find the providers in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges, with their respective licences and fees.
First: who issues the token, and in which country are they based? Second: where does the deposited share sit, and who confirms that? Third: what happens to your claim if the provider discontinues the service? If you find no documented answer to these three questions on the provider's own site, that is already the answer.
For pure crypto assets the position in Germany is settled: gains on disposal fall under private sales transactions in section 23 of the Income Tax Act. After one year of holding they are tax-free, below that your personal rate applies, and an exemption limit of €1,000 covers all private sales transactions of a year taken together. Once it is exceeded, the entire gain becomes taxable, not merely the excess portion.
For a product that represents a share, section 20 of the Income Tax Act may apply instead: investment income, 25 percent withholding tax plus solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax, but without a holding period and with the saver's allowance of €1,000. Which of the two worlds governs a specific token depends on its legal structure and is often ambiguous for products from foreign issuers. This is no side issue: on a gain of €5,000, the gap between tax-free after a year and a flat 25 percent runs into four figures.
We have written up the details of this distinction in our article on tokenised equities and German tax. Anyone holding positions across several chains and exchanges needs a clean transaction history for it; which programmes import data from cross-chain swaps properly is shown in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers. For a binding assessment of your individual case, your tax adviser remains responsible.
For tax purposes, a swap through an intent is a sale of the unit given up and a purchase of the unit received, even though it feels like a single movement to you. If it runs across several chains, it often produces two unconnected entries in your tax software. Anyone who notices this only next spring is hunting for records of transactions that are months old. Note down the date, the two units and the euro equivalent for every cross-chain swap.
An asset that has tripled in 30 days carries a different risk from the same asset four weeks ago. The daily range of September 27, between $4.94 and $5.57, corresponds to around 12 percent. Anyone working with tenfold leverage loses the entire stake on a 10 percent move against their position, and at NEAR those 10 percent currently sit inside a normal trading day. That range comes from measurement. It carries no forecast.
Two points that regularly cost money in fast moves: the spread widens in thin order books at precisely the moment when many want to trade at once, and funding rates on perpetual contracts climb sharply in a hot phase, because the long side predominates. Anyone holding a leveraged position over several days pays that rate repeatedly. If you use perpetuals all the same, compare the funding rates and the liquidation rules of the individual platforms beforehand.
Three points of orientation emerge from the data collected, all as of September 27, 22:49 UTC. To the upside, the daily high of $5.57 is the next visible hurdle; above it begins fresh ground for this cycle. To the downside, the daily low of $4.94 marks the zone where the buy side last stepped in. And above all of it stands the all-time high of $20.44 from January 16, 2022: even after last month's tripling, some 73 percent is still missing to get there.
These points serve as levels. None of them is a target, and they say nothing about the direction of the price. Their use lies in letting you fix your exit and your position size in advance, instead of deciding in the middle of a move.
The most reliable early indicator here is deposited value on the chain. If chain TVL falls in the coming days below the September 23 level of around $204 million while swap-layer volume declines, a large part of the inflows was probably tied to incentives. If it holds above that mark and volume keeps growing, that speaks for genuine usage. You can look up both figures publicly, without depending on anyone's assessment.
What to take away: NEAR is rising on measurable usage, with 91.6 percent more value deposited on the chain in eleven days on our own query of September 27. An announcement on its own did not lift it. The launch of Ondo Stocks on September 22 and the growing Zcash swap flow through NEAR Intents are the two documented drivers behind it. Two questions stay open for you in Germany: whether this access is open here at all, and under which provision a gain from it is taxed. Settle both of them before you buy.
(As of September 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
