NEAR Demand Ledger

An investment thesis for NEAR, tested against public data. Built for NEAR HACKATHON (Build Beyond Boundaries), track: Investment Thesis. Hypothesis: settlement volume through NEAR Intents grows ahead of the activity visible on mainnet, so it reads as a leading indicator of demand for the network. Every figure on this page is computed by scripts/analyze.py from the snapshots in data/; rebuild with bash rebuild.sh. Daily series run to 2026-11-10; the DefiLlama window ends 2026-11-09 (the last two days are dropped, they are partial).

Pillar 1: Real staking yield

Validators (current epoch, RPC)338
Total staked581,233,869 NEAR (44.3% of supply)
Top 10 validators' share of stake36.3%
Protocol max inflation (on-chain config)2.5% per year
Measured net supply inflation, last 365 days2.48%
Staking APY, last completed epoch (NEARBlocks)4.91%
Real yield (APY adjusted for net inflation)2.37%
Net supply inflation chart
Net supply inflation, annualized from month-end total supply (NEARBlocks daily panel). The step down from about 5% to about 2.5% is the protocol inflation cut reaching mainnet. Source: data/nearblocks_daily.csv.

Stakers earn about 4.91% nominal while supply grows 2.48%, so a staker's share of the network grows roughly 2.37% a year. That part of the demand story holds: staking pays a real, positive return without new buyers.

Pillar 2: Active accounts (Metcalfe)

Daily active accounts, 30-day average58,223
Same window a year ago262,972
Daily transactions, 30-day average662,520
Same window a year ago4,444,290
New accounts per day, 30-day average9,573
Same window a year ago220,745
Metcalfe fit, monthly, log market cap on log active accountsslope 0.21, R² 0.28 (73 months)
Active accounts chart
Daily active accounts, monthly average (NEARBlocks). Activity peaked in 2024 and has fallen since; the level shift between March and April 2026 (3,479,269 to 946,610 transactions a day) is flagged in THESIS.md as an unresolved break in the series.
Daily transactions chart
Daily transactions, last 365 days (NEARBlocks daily panel).

On mainnet's own numbers, usage is shrinking, not growing. Price rose over the same year while active accounts fell by about two thirds. Whatever demand is building for NEAR, this series does not show it.

Pillar 3: Net supply and fee burn

Total supply now1,311,369,614 NEAR
Net new supply, last 365 days31,740,869 NEAR
Transaction fees, last 365 days596,325 NEAR
Fees as a share of net new supply1.88%
Daily fees chart
Transaction fees per day in NEAR (NEARBlocks daily panel). Even if every NEAR of fees were burned, fees would offset only 1.88% of new issuance.

NEAR is not fee-funded at current usage. Supply growth is a policy variable (the inflation cap), not a market outcome, and fees are too small to change that.

Pillar 4: Intents and DeFi share

NEAR Intents volume, 30 full days to 2026-11-09$3,727,751,510
Average per day$124,258,384
Average per day, same window a year earlier$77,935,548
Share of all DEX-classified volume on Near (DefiLlama)92.6%
Largest native DEX (Rhea), 30 days$288,871,260
Fees earned by NEAR Intents, 30 days (DefiLlama fees)$5,458,382
NEAR Intents TVL, all chains / on Near itself$184,004,347 / $91,749,436
Total value locked on Near (DefiLlama)$169,269,941
NEAR Intents volume chart
NEAR Intents daily volume as classified by DefiLlama (its Near DEX overview includes NEAR Intents as a protocol). Series starts 2024-12-10. DefiLlama figures come from its adapter, not from our own chain read; the gap between this series and mainnet activity is the subject of THESIS.md.

Intents is where the growth is. It settles more in a day than the largest native DEX settles in weeks, and it barely registers in mainnet transaction counts, because most settlement happens off the mainnet shards. That is exactly why the two data sets disagree.

Read the full thesis (THESIS.md) · README