NEAR Token Price Surges 20% Ahead of Founder's Appearance at Nvidia AI Conference

According to CoinDesk, NEAR, the native token of layer-1 blockchain NEAR Protocol, has surged 20% in the past 24 hours, reaching $7.00, its highest level since May 2022. The price increase comes ahead of NEAR Protocol co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin's appearance as a speaker at Nvidia's AI conference next week. Polosukhin will participate in a panel titled 'Transforming AI,' hosted by Nvidia's founder and CEO Jensen Huang. The upcoming release of Near Tasks, a new product focused on AI, has also contributed to the price surge and sparked discussions about potential collaboration between NEAR and Nvidia. The gains in NEAR's price are reflected across the crypto AI market, with fetch.ai (FET), the graph (GRT), and singularityNET (AGIX) all posting gains of over 30% in the past week, according to CoinMarketCap. The CoinDesk 20 index (CD20) has risen by 9.18% in the same period. The surge has also been supported by bitcoin reaching a record high of $72,446 on Monday. Crypto venture capital firm DeFiance Capital's CEO Arthur Cheong further fueled bullish sentiment by posting on social media that 'the future is NEAR' after the token's price rose to $7.00. NEAR Protocol began as NEAR.AI in 2017, an AI company unrelated to blockchain. The team started building the NEAR protocol in 2018, and the mainnet was launched in 2020. Before founding Near, Polosukhin worked at Google Research, where he developed models and tools that would later contribute to AI. NEAR is a proof-of-stake blockchain that relies on a consensus protocol called Nightshade, allowing it to operate at about 100,000 transactions per second and process a block a second. The token currently has a market cap of $7.45 billion, according to CoinDesk data.