The biggest mover in crypto on Monday morning wasn’t bitcoin. It was NEAR, up roughly 23% to just above $4, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the NEAR token itself.
The move traces to NEAR Intents, a swap service built on the NEAR blockchain. It lets a wallet trade one token for another across different chains without the user having to move funds between them first. That’s the kind of plumbing most people never think about until it starts carrying real volume.
And it is carrying real volume now. Major consumer wallets such as ZODL and Vizor have plugged NEAR Intents in to offer ZEC swaps, and daily ZEC volume routed through the service jumped sixfold in the past week. NEAR has become the routing layer for one of the most heavily traded tokens on the market, and its own token has followed the traffic.
ZEC itself barely moved
Here’s the part worth sitting with. ZEC, the token generating all that swap demand, gained just 3% to just above $1,500. The infrastructure underneath it captured the bigger repricing.
That’s a pattern worth watching if you hold either asset. When a chain becomes the pipe for someone else’s trading frenzy, the pipe can outrun the water flowing through it, at least for a week.
Bitcoin adds to the tokenized-stock rally
Bitcoin traded just above $81,000 as of Monday Asian morning hours, up less than 1% over 24 hours. That’s a quiet print on its own, but it extends the ground bitcoin has taken since Thursday, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cleared a path for onchain trading of tokenized U.S. stocks.
Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at exchange BTSE, put the weekend’s bitcoin spike down to that SEC decision and the short squeeze that followed. He sees little on the calendar this week beyond remarks from Federal Reserve officials.
“I’d expect more volatility in the last few weeks leading up to that event,” Mei said of the Fed’s late-October meeting. That leaves more than a month of speeches and a single inflation print to shift positioning before then.
The rest of the majors
Outside NEAR, the board was mostly green but unremarkable. BNB rose 2% to nearly $777. Ether and HYPE each picked up about 2%.
XRP, DOGE, SOL and TRX rose 1% or less. Nothing in that group suggests fresh money chasing a narrative; it reads more like drift in the wake of bitcoin’s weekend move.
Equities set the tone
The crypto tape took its cue from stocks through the Asian session. MSCI’s Asia Pacific gauge climbed nearly 1%, led by technology shares in South Korea and Taiwan. The lift came after U.S. officials described talks with China as “very successful” ahead of a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping this week.
S&P 500 futures rose less than 1% and Nasdaq 100 contracts a little more. Brent crude fell 2% to just above $101 a barrel, its fourth straight decline, which eased inflation worries and lifted Treasury futures.
Cheaper oil and a friendlier U.S.-China backdrop are the kind of macro tailwinds that tend to keep risk assets bid without anyone needing a crypto-specific reason. That fits what bitcoin did: not much, but in the right direction.
What to watch from here
The NEAR trade is the one with a clear, checkable driver. If ZEC swap volume through NEAR Intents keeps climbing, the routing-layer story holds. If it fades, a 23% single-day move built on one week of traffic has a lot of room to give back.
For bitcoin, Mei’s read is the useful one: a thin week, then a run-up into the Fed’s late-October meeting where speeches and one inflation print do the work. Don’t expect the tokenized-stock story to carry the price on its own once the squeeze has played out.
