The NEAR price has jumped in the past two straight days as investors reflect on the partnership with Terra. The coin is trading at $9.89, which is slightly above this week’s low of about $8. Its total market capitalization has risen to more than $5.6 billion.
Why is NEAR rising?
The Near Protocol is a leading and fast-growing smart contract platform that is attempting to improve on the services offered by Ethereum. It allows developers to build projects like decentralized finance (DeFi), metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Near Protocol uses a technology known as sharding to boost its speeds. In sharding, blocks are divided into shards, which helps to improve the overall speed of the network. Indeed, the Near Protocol can process more than 10,000 transactions per second (tps) while transactions cost significantly less in the network.
NEAR price is rising today because of the recently-announced partnership between the Near Protocol and Terra. As I wrote earlier, Terra has grown to become the second-biggest smart contract platform in the world after Ethereum.
The new partnership will see Terra integrate its UST stablecoin on the NEAR and Aurora ecosystems. This is notable since UST is the fourth biggest stablecoin in the world valued at more than $9 billion. This partnership was enabled by the partnership with DeFi platforms like NearPad and Rose. In a statement, a co-founder of NEAR said:
“Stablecoins like UST provide a simple interface to store value and interact with apps that need to use a stable unit of account. Connecting NEAR and Terra ecosystems via Allbridge allows apps like Rose and NearPad to offer new ways to use stablecoins to both communities.”
Another possible reason why the NEAR price is rising is that the number of transactions in its network are rising as shown below.
The daily chart shows that the NEAR price has been in a tight range in the past few days. The coin is trading at $9.91, which is a few points above this week’s low of $8. It is slightly above the 25-day and 50-day moving averages while the price is slightly above the ascending trendline that is shown in blue.
Therefore, while it is a bit early to tell, there is a likelihood that the coin will keep rising as bulls target the upper side of the channel at about $13.50. On the flip side, a drop below the key support at $8 will invalidate this view. It will send a signal that there are still sellers left in the market.
