NEAR▼$2.12 price fell about 10% after a sharp rally even as BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said the token could rise 20x.
The price of NEAR fell 9.8% on Wednesday, May 27 after a sharp rally, even as Arthur Hayes, co-founder of crypto exchange BitMEX, said the token could rise 20x if NEAR becomes a key rail for private cross-chain payments.
Hayes made the comments on The Rollup podcast, where he linked the NEAR thesis to privacy demand, Zcash and NEAR Intents, a system that lets users move assets across blockchains without manually dealing with bridges.
“I think NEAR has a 20x potential where, you know, Zcash might have a 5x potential over the next year,” Hayes said on the podcast. He also said he had a larger Zcash position than NEAR because, in his view, the higher upside target also carries higher risk.
At current market prices, a 20x move would imply a NEAR price near $50, far above current levels.
As of press, NEAR is dealing with pullback though, which follows a fast move higher. CoinGecko data shows NEAR more than doubled from about $1.3 earlier in May to around $2.72 on May 26 before sliding.
Why Hayes Links NEAR to Privacy
Hayes said his privacy thesis is built around Zcash, the privacy-focused crypto, and NEAR, the Layer-1 blockchain that has been pushing chain abstraction and AI-agent infrastructure.
As the BitMEX co-founder argues, shielded Zcash is useful for private money, but NEAR Intents can make it easier to move that private value into other chains. On the podcast, Hayes described using shielded Zcash with NEAR Intents to move into assets such as USDT▲$0.9990 on TRON “in an anonymous fashion.”
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin also framed privacy as a requirement for everyday crypto payments, adding that people won’t want ordinary purchases or invoices visible to the whole internet.
Read more: NEAR Protocol Price Prediction 2026: Why Is NEAR Price Surging and Can It Hit New Highs?
