NEAR Protocol’s stablecoin ecosystem saw its market capitalization surge by a staggering 717% in the last six months to $567 million. This rise was driven by USDC, which reached a market cap of $330 million (+303% QoQ), and USDT, which reached $187 million (+117% QoQ) in Q2 2024.
Source: Messari
NEAR posts impressive market performance in Q2 2024
In Q2 2024, NEAR’s circulating and diluted market caps plummeted by 23.6% and 26.5%, respectively, from Q1, yet it ranked 17th in crypto market cap rankings. This result shows that, despite its respective declines, NEAR outperformed many other crypto assets.
Its earnings from network transaction fees rocketed by over 43% to roughly $2.8 million. The rise in collected fees comes despite a 15% plunge in its average transaction fee from the previous quarter. The escalated earnings could be attributed to the elevated transactions for the stablecoin.
The average daily active addresses also grew to 1.9 million, marking a 51% increase in QoQ. There was also a scale-up in daily new addresses, up 40% from Q1, raising the number of NEAR transactions.
NEAR’s leading application in activity was KAIKAINOW, Cosmose AI’s opt-in interactive lock screen and mobile app that provides curated content and shopping based on the consumer’s preferences. This app allowed consumers to earn KAI-Ching tokens on the NEAR blockchain for engaging with their provided content and for any purchases. As a result, there was a spike in NEAR’s activity, considering KAIKAINOW has over 960,000 daily active addresses by Q2’s end.
NEAR Foundation works on more development projects in Q2 2024
In Q2 2024, the NEAR Foundation achieved good progress in its development initiatives. In addition to hosting hackathons and supporting community organizations, the foundation created an Infrastructure Committee. It allocated a $4 million budget aimed at improving its RPC nodes, wallets and cross-chain bridges.
NEAR also announced partnerships at the International Tech Summit in Bermuda with Nayms and Mountain Protocol. Of all the partnership agreements, Mountain’s USDM, a leading stablecoin, would be added to the NEAR protocol.
Moreover, Nayms and NEAR will also start working to address the challenges of pricing and securing insurance for blockchain ventures by changing existing insurance models. Its Nuffle Labs also announced the Nuffle Fast Finality Layer in testnet, which, if approved, will decrease transaction costs by 4000 times.