NEAR Protocol Sees Near-Vertical Ascent in Activity, Driven by Kai-Ching and Sweat Economy

NEAR, a smart contract Layer 1 protocol, has been on a near-vertical ascent in terms of activity in 2024.

Smart contract Layer 1 protocol NEAR has seen a near-vertical ascent in activity this year.

Total transactions have soared more than fourfold from 300 million in late August to 1.3 billion in the past few days, according to FlipsideCrypto. Throughput has also skyrocketed, jumping from an average of 300,000 daily transactions in mid-2023 to a peak of 6 million in late May.

Wallets created on NEAR show a similar trend, more than doubling to 75 million from 30 million since September 2023. Daily wallet creation has also been in a significant uptrend, from roughly 30,000 created daily in August 2023 to 209,000 recently.

Crypto exchange OKX also unveiled support for NEAR in its Web3 wallet, aiming to scale Web3 through Chain Abstraction. The integration, which took place May 28, now enables users to seamlessly transfer NEAR tokens to 95 different blockchains.

The rising activity has fueled a rally in the NEAR token, which — despite a 4% drop today — has gained 350% in the past year.

Kai-Ching, Sweat Economy Drive Activity

Two dApps are leading the way in terms of traffic for NEAR.

Kai-Ching, the native stablecoin of the KAIKAINOW shopping app, places second for unique active wallets among all blockchain dapps, according to DappRadar, showcasing 946,000 in the past 24 hours. That’s a 30% increase since Nov. 2023.

The jump signals that the partnership between KAIKAINOW and shopping behemoth Cosmose AI, which uses artificial intelligence to power better shopping experiences, has been a success.

Sweat Economy is the second main driver. The “walk-to-earn” app is designed to incentivize physical activity and currently has 226,000 unique active wallets, a 2x jump since Nov. 2023.

Sustained Success

While many projects exhibit short-term bursts of activity, NEAR’s activity appears to be healthy and sustained.

Metrics across the board not only spiked, but the fact that the network maintained its uptick in activity shows that users flocked to it and stayed – indicating that Kai-Ching and Sweat Economy may have found product-market fit.