NEAR gained 81% in a week around its confidential perps launch, joining Zcash in the privacy trade, but derivatives data says the move is no longer early.
Privacy has been crypto's standout trade this month, and until now it had one name attached to it: Zcash. NEAR is making the case to be the second. The token gained 81% between 13 and 20 September, according to data from Santiment, in a move built around the launch of confidential perpetual futures on its trading interface.
NEAR traded at $4.35 on 22 September 2026, according to CoinGecko, up 81.2% over seven days with a market capitalization of about $5.69 billion.
The question traders are now asking is not whether the move is real, but how much of it is still ahead. The data does not signal exhaustion yet, but this is no longer early.
On 17 September, NEAR made perpetual futures confidential by default on near.com, using Hyperliquid for the underlying markets and liquidity. A perpetual future is a leveraged contract that tracks an asset's price with no expiry date, which makes it the most heavily traded product in crypto derivatives.
The privacy layer changes who can see what. Deposits route through NEAR's Confidential Intents system, which separates a trader's public account from the funding and trading activity behind a position. The trades themselves still appear on Hyperliquid's order book. What disappears is the public link between a wallet and the position it opened. NEAR Protocol wrote on X when announcing the launch,
"Open a position from the account you already use, and nobody can tell it's yours."
That is a narrower claim than it sounds, and a more practical one. Large traders on public ledgers are easy to track and front-run. Hiding who holds a position, without hiding the market, targets that specific problem.
Zcash has carried the privacy narrative through September, reaching a decade high on 9 September on the back of Grayscale's Zcash ETF and a surge in mining activity.
NEAR's angle is different. Zcash is a privacy coin, built to shield payments. NEAR is applying privacy to trading execution, which gives the narrative a second, distinct use case rather than a second copy of the first.
Santiment's read rests on three numbers, and the second one does the most work.
Open interest, the total value of outstanding futures positions, rose 119% in dollar terms over the week. Measured in NEAR tokens, it rose only 21%.
That gap matters. Most of the dollar increase came from the price of positions that already existed rising, not from traders piling in with new ones. In coin terms, as Santiment put it, this was a 21% week, not a 119% one. That is a healthier profile than a rally driven by fresh leverage.
Funding is the caution flag. Funding rates are the periodic payments between long and short traders that keep a perpetual contract near the spot price, and high positive funding means longs are paying up to hold their bets. NEAR's funding reached 1.6 times its two-month median on 20 September.
But Santiment noted that two ordinary days earlier in the same window had already hit that level. Elevated funding here is not unusual on its own, which is why the firm stopped short of calling the move overheated.
The move puts NEAR price well above the levels it traded at before the launch, but the long-term picture is still a recovery from deep lows. The token sits roughly 79% below its all-time high of $20.44, according to CoinGecko.
The $4 level is the first test. Holding above it keeps the breakout intact. A slide back below it, particularly if funding climbs further while open interest in NEAR terms stalls, would suggest leverage was doing more of the lifting than the product was.
On the upside, $5 is the next psychological level. What matters more than any single price is whether trading activity on the confidential perps product holds up once the launch attention fades. The price has moved on the announcement. Sustained usage is what would justify it.
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