- Near Protocol price has jumped by more than 37% from the YTD low.
- The developers reached a deal with Alibaba Cloud.
- There are concerns about the impact of the deal to the network.
Near Protocol price staged a strong recovery on Monday after the developers inked a partnership with one of the biggest companies in the world. NEAR price jumped to a high of $1.60, the highest point since June 5th of this year. It has jumped by more than 37.80% from the lowest level this month.
Near Protocol deal with Alibaba
The biggest crypto news on Monday was the partnership between Near Foundation and Alibaba, one of the biggest companies in the world. Precisely, Near Protocol joined Alibaba Cloud, which is a major competitor to Amazon AWS service.
The purpose of the deal is to give developers in the Middle East and Asia access to developer tools in Alibaba Cloud. Also, developers who wish to deploy validators in the ecosystem will be able to use Alibaba Cloud’s plug-and-play infrastructure services. In addition, the two companies will be able to receive remote procedure calls (RPC) because of the partnership.
Near Protocol hopes that this partnership will help it gain more developers in the ecosystem. The partnership comes at a time when Western countries are scrutinizing Alibaba’s cloud computing business as tensions between the US and China continues.
It also comes at a time when Near Protocol is emerging from the FTX crisis. Like Solana, Near was one of the biggest receivers of FTX and Alameda Resources funds. At the time, most tokens associated with these funding tumbled.
Meanwhile, Near Protocol has struggled to grow its ecosystem in the past few months. For example, data compiled by DeFi Llama shows that the network has just 36,911 active users and a total value locked of $84 million. It has only 20 DeFi dApps in its ecosystem.
Near Protocol price forecast
The daily chart shows that the $NEAR price bottomed at $1.1621 this month. This was an important level since it coincided with the lowest level in December 31st last year. The token moved above the 50-day and 25-day moving averages.
Near price has also formed an inverted cup and handle pattern, which is a sign of a bearish continuation. Therefore, there is a likelihood that the token will likely continue falling in the near term. If this happens, the next level to watch will be at $1.2451, the lowest point in December. A break below this level will see it drop to the next support at $1.0.
