NEAR Stays Within $39 Million of Stellar in Oct. 8 Market Cap

Stellar remained narrowly ahead of NEAR Protocol’s token, NEAR, in market capitalization on Oct. 8, with the two assets separated by about $39 million as U.S. trading access and cross-chain activity expanded.

Stellar (XLM) had a $7.02 billion market capitalization, compared with $6.98 billion for NEAR. Stellar closed at $0.191956 with $194.03 million in trading volume, while NEAR closed at $4.46 with $1.10 billion in volume. The figures are measured in UTC.

The market-cap comparison is more relevant than the individual token prices because the assets have different supplies. Stellar remained slightly ahead in the Oct. 8 snapshot, while NEAR recorded more than five times Stellar’s trading volume.

The Bitwise NEAR ETF, ticker NRR, began trading on NYSE Arca on Sept. 29. The fund charges a 0.75% management fee and held 13,159,430.50 NEAR tokens valued at $59,875,408.78 as of Oct. 7. All of its holdings were allocated to NEAR.

NRR listed a 4.92% gross staking reward rate and a 3.30% net staking reward rate as of Oct. 6. Its target and current staking allocations were both 100%.

NEAR Intents had processed more than $32 billion in volume, compared with less than $1 billion a year earlier. NEAR Intents supports cross-chain transactions, including swaps across different blockchain networks.

Robinhood Chain went live on near.com on Oct. 7. The integration allows users to swap Ether (ETH) and Global Dollar (USDG) against more than 180 assets across more than 30 chains, along with deposits, withdrawals and payments to and from Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless, AI-native Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain designed for financial services and real-world assets. NEAR Protocol and Stellar Lumens are among the assets supported for crypto transfers.

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said, “NEAR sits at the intersection of two of the biggest trends in technology: AI and crypto.”

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, said, “NEAR is the vertically integrated stack for the AI + blockchain future: AI is the front end, blockchain is the back end.”