NEAR is sitting at $1.73 right now, and traders are watching the $1.85 level like hawks. The token has been building momentum, and analyst Michael van de Poppe sees the technical setup improving. Break above $1.85 and the next leg higher looks real. Miss it, and honestly, that's just a chance to load up cheaper before the move happens anyway.
The real story though is what NEAR is actually doing under the hood. Stripe and Tempo built an AI-driven payment protocol called Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP. NEAR just bolted on something called NEAR Intents that lets MPP work across more than 30 blockchains at once. This matters because AI agents, the autonomous software bots that are starting to move real money, need somewhere to settle those payments fast and cheap. NEAR is positioning itself as that settlement layer.
Think about it this way. An AI agent on one chain needs to move funds to another chain to execute a trade or make a payment. Before, that was messy and expensive. Now it just routes through NEAR's network and lands on 30 different blockchains without friction. As more of these autonomous agents hit the market and start doing financial transactions on their own, the demand for that kind of cross-chain plumbing is going to spike.
With $2.26 billion in market cap and $99.73 million in daily volume, NEAR has the liquidity to handle real traffic. The $1.85 resistance isn't just a random number, either. Analysts are watching it because a clean break there would signal that the smart money is ready to push higher. A pullback below current levels would just be the market giving buyers another entry point before the next run.
This is informational content, not financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
