Research note 01 · NEAR Intents · data to 2026-11-13

NEAR is becoming a settlement layer. Its token has not caught up.

$859.7Ma week

settled through NEAR Intents, up from $0.8M. Over the same months the NEAR price fell from $5.30 to $4.38.

Price correlation −0.05 Market cap 477x yearly revenue Falsifiers met 0 of 5

01 · The flow

Usage climbed while the price slid.

Weekly Intents volume against the NEAR price. Hover or tap any week.

Intents weekly volumeNEAR price, right axis

Source: DefiLlama, NearBlocks. 99 weeks, 2024-12-10 to 2026-11-13.

02 · The case

For and against, weighed the same.

Each half of the thesis tested on its own, so one cannot hide the other.

Usage is real

1.46%

of all onchain DEX volume now runs through Intents, up from 0.003%.

−0.05

correlation of weekly volume changes with NEAR price. Price does not drive usage.

−0.08

correlation with Bitcoin. Not crypto beta either.

All evidence for

Weekly volume went from $0.8M to $859.7M (first versus last 4 weeks), while price went from $5.30 to $4.38.
Share of DEX volume: 0.003%, then 1.03%, then 1.46% (first, previous and latest 13 weeks).
Correlation −0.05, 90% bootstrap interval −0.21 to +0.12, over 99 weeks.
Neither leads: price last week against volume this week +0.06; the reverse +0.05.
Bitcoin −0.08 over 51 weeks. It does follow the whole DEX market (+0.34), as a venue should.
Last 365 days: $32.97B settled, $54.3M in fees.

−

Holders capture little

477x

NEAR market cap to yearly Intents revenue. The token keeps a thin slice.

−91%

daily active accounts on NEAR, first versus latest quarter.

−19%

stablecoins on NEAR over the last year.

All evidence against

Intents kept $9.4M of revenue in 365 days, about 2.8 basis points of volume. Chain gas fees: $1.1M. Market cap $4.48B is 477x revenue and 3,906x chain fees.
Levels point the wrong way: log volume against log price correlates at −0.52.
Active accounts averaged 775,618, then 70,872. Some may be bots leaving.
Stablecoins fell from $164.5M to $133.4M.
Volume can flatter: near-thesis found public swaps match only part of reported volume on sampled days.

Share of all DEX volume

Intents, weekly %

Source: DefiLlama

Weekly changes

Each dot is one week. r = −0.05

x: NEAR price change %, y: Intents volume change %

Where the money goes, last 365 days

Source: DefiLlama, NearBlocks

Base chain activity

Active accounts per day, weekly average

Source: NearBlocks

03 · What would change our mind

0 of 5

tests that would prove the thesis wrong are met. Thresholds live in settlemark.toml and run on every rebuild.

F1Intents usage moves with NEAR priceweekly change correlation above 0.5−0.05Not met
F2Intents is losing groundshare of all DEX volume, last 13 weeks below the 13 weeks before+0.43 ptsNot met
F3NEAR price leads Intents usagelagged correlation above 0.3+0.06Not met
F4Intents is just crypto betaweekly change correlation with Bitcoin above 0.5−0.08Not met
F5Holders capture the flowmarket cap below 50x yearly Intents revenue (if met, the small capture half is wrong)477xNot met

04 · Verdict

The use is real. The value capture is not there yet. NEAR is a long term buy only if that changes. Watch revenue, not price.

# no keys, no accounts, no cost $ npm run setup $ npm run rebuild $ npm test

1
Fetch nine public datasets with retries and caching. Every row keeps its source and time.
2
Validate each file against a schema before any maths.
3
Analyse weekly changes with bootstrap intervals and a fixed seed.
4
Render this page, THESIS.md and every chart. No number typed by hand.

Limits

Free public APIs only. The Intents Explorer API needs a partner token and was not used.
A by hand cross check on the NEAR BigQuery public dataset counted 2,968,076 to 5,144,507 receipt actions a day from 2026-11-08 to 2026-11-13 (CSV). It is a 7 day snapshot, not a trend.
Weekly correlations over two years are noisy, and early weeks are tiny.
NearBlocks can miss signers behind relayers. CoinGecko's free tier gives 365 days, so the Bitcoin test is shorter.