NEAR Protocol extended its September rally on Friday, briefly reaching around $3.50 at 04:16 UTC after gaining 30.8% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data captured during the move. The token was up 4.3% over one hour, 46.1% over seven days, 78.9% over 14 days and 120.1% over 30 days. Its market capitalization reached roughly $4.575 billion and 24-hour volume rose to $1.786 billion. NEAR gained about 29% against Bitcoin, outperforming the broader market. CoinMarketCap showed a separate reading of about $3.44, up 27.6%, with a 24-hour range of $2.64 to $3.45; differences reflect the aggregators’ exchange coverage and weighting methods. The latest catalyst was NEAR Protocol’s September 17 announcement that perpetual positions on near.com became confidential by default. Users can open positions from existing accounts without publicly linking positions to those accounts. NEAR’s Confidential Intents system uses a dedicated shard connected to mainnet through a Trusted Execution Environment-based bridge, allowing order size, direction and other transaction details to remain outside the public mempool while preserving selective disclosure. The development followed a report that Confidential Intents total value locked had exceeded $70 million, triggering the first snapshot under the NEAR@3.33 milestone program. Its 333,333 milestone tokens remain locked until NEAR’s three-day volume-weighted average price holds at or above $3.33. Trading activity also intensified, with CoinMarketCap recording roughly $1.77 billion in 24-hour volume, up 142.8% and equal to nearly 40% of market capitalization. NEAR rose from around $1.89 at the start of September, passing $2.50, $3.00 and $3.33. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said NEAR AI Cloud was seeing a “massive spike” in sign-ups as users sought encrypted AI prompts, without disclosing an absolute figure. The next market tests are whether $3.33 holds and whether the token can sustain moves above $3.50. A drop below $3.33 would refocus attention on $3.00, while $2.64 is a deeper reference point. NEAR is a proof-of-stake Layer-1 blockchain using sharding, cross-chain execution and an expanding AI infrastructure stack. Its token supports network transaction fees and staking, with about 1.307 billion NEAR in circulation according to CoinMarketCap. CoinGecko’s community poll showed roughly 90% bullish responses and 10% bearish, a user-voting measure rather than institutional-flow or positioning data.