NEAR drops below five dollars and comes back: down 11.7 percent after the Nasdaq purchase

NEAR costs around $5.09 at midday on October 13, putting it 11.7 percent lower than 24 hours earlier. Bitcoin shed 0.3 percent over the same period and Ether 2.3 percent. At its intraday low NEAR stood at $4.90, below the round five-dollar mark; the jump a report from New York set off on Sunday has been given back in full. Nasdaq-listed SVRN, Inc. has bought FastNEAR, the operator of the servers through which practically every NEAR wallet and every NEAR app talks to the blockchain.

The details of the acquisition are in the Form 6-K that SVRN filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 9. What it says is more concrete for holders than any price figure, because it concerns the route by which your balance appears on the display at all.

What SVRN bought with FastNEAR: RPC servers, archive nodes and the NEARDATA service

RPC stands for remote procedure call and denotes the interface through which a wallet or an app asks something of a blockchain node or hands it a transaction. An RPC provider therefore runs the servers that hold a current copy of the blockchain and answer on behalf of users.

According to the press release in the SEC filing, FastNEAR operates three things: a fleet of such RPC servers, an archive infrastructure holding NEAR's complete transaction history, and NEARDATA, a data service developers use. SVRN cites more than 3.5 billion requests a month and more than 100 terabytes of data. FastNEAR has been a wholly owned subsidiary since October 8; co-founders Evgeny Kuzyakov and Mike Purvis have moved to SVRN. The company does not name the purchase price.

SVRN chief Sal Ternullo justifies the purchase in the release by saying that everything built on NEAR depends on infrastructure most people never see. When a wallet shows a balance or an application submits a transaction, something has to answer, fast and correctly, every time. The company announces that it will invest in reliability and capacity; for existing customers the services are meant to continue without interruption.

Why buying an RPC operator moves the NEAR price

The mechanism behind it is simpler than the technology sounds. SVRN holds NEAR on its own balance sheet and thereby gives its shareholders exposure to the token. Until now it was a pure holding company with staking. FastNEAR adds an operating business that has revenue of its own from paying customers and whose value does not depend on the NEAR price. For the market that means a listed buyer is binding itself more deeply to a network it can no longer exit cheaply without damaging its own business.

That fits what SVRN writes in the same release about its other role. The company stakes its holdings with validators that secure the network and takes part in governance; it co-authored the programme that has paid operators of MPC nodes according to performance since February 2026. A buyer that bundles technology, voting rights and balance sheet in the same network is a different signal for investors than a fund that merely collects tokens.

NEAR, Bitcoin and Ether over 24 hours: minus 11.7 against minus 0.3 against minus 2.3 percent

Over one day the gap is clear. NEAR lost 11.6 to 11.7 percent depending on the data provider, Bitcoin 0.3 percent, Ether 2.3 percent. Over a week the picture reverses: NEAR is down around 3.2 to 4.2 percent, just behind Bitcoin, which shed around 2.9 percent, but ahead of Ether at around 7.5 percent. The daily loss hits NEAR considerably harder than the broad market; measured over seven days Ether is the weakest of the three. NEAR's trading volume over those 24 hours came to around $1.28 billion.

Market capitalisation stands at around $6.65 billion, trading volume over the past 24 hours at $1.04 to $1.14 billion. On the ranking the providers diverge: CoinGecko lists NEAR in 21st place, Coinpaprika in 24th. Anyone reading a figure such as "top 20" should therefore know that it depends on the chosen provider and not on any official list.

NEAR Intents: $33.57 billion in total volume and $122.8 million in a day

The second reason that comes up in reporting on the NEAR rally is NEAR Intents. It is a swap system in which users declare a desired swap and competing service providers execute it, instead of tokens being locked across a bridge and minted anew. According to DefiLlama data the system has turned over $33.57 billion in total.

That sum is a cumulative figure since launch and says nothing about what is happening there today. The current values are smaller: $122.8 million over 24 hours, $1.15 billion over seven days, $4.74 billion over 30 days. The daily figure is therefore around 20 percent below the previous day's, even though the price rose. Read the 33 billion as current volume and you overestimate demand by more than twentyfold. In the autumn part of the volume came from Zcash swaps, that is, from a single fashion that can ebb away again.

What changes for NEAR holders: wallet, RPC endpoint and custody

The sale of FastNEAR changes nothing about your coins. Your keys remain your keys, and the balances still sit on the blockchain. What changes is the ownership of one of the routes by which you reach the blockchain. In practice that means three things.

First: in many wallets you can see and change the RPC endpoint in the settings. Take a look there at which provider is entered. An endpoint is interchangeable, and knowing several providers is the simplest safeguard against the failure of a single one.

Second: an RPC server sees which address asks what and when. A wallet that sends all requests through one provider leaves a movement profile there. That is not a theft risk, but it is a data protection point that takes on a different quality with a listed owner than with a small team.

Third: anyone holding larger balances separates custody from access. The keys sit on a hardware wallet, and which server queries the blockchain is then purely a question of convenience with no access to the assets. That separation is the real protection, not the choice of provider.

Staking and validators: 412 nodes secure NEAR, and FastNEAR is not among them

This gets confused often, so here is the clear distinction: validators produce blocks and secure consensus, RPC servers answer requests. Those are two separate layers. NEARBlocks currently counts 412 nodes online, block time is 0.6 seconds, and more than 5.46 billion transactions have been processed in total. The acquisition has changed nothing at that layer.

That is the most important framing of the day: whoever buys FastNEAR buys access, not control over the network. A buyer could raise prices, discontinue services or log requests. It could not forge a transaction, roll back a block or take anyone's coins away. Anyone who sees SVRN staking and infers influence over consensus from it is confusing the balance sheet with the technology; the staking confers voting weight in the network, the RPC purchase does not.

MyNearWallet closes on October 31: the key migration is still running

Independently of the acquisition, a deadline is running in the NEAR orbit that is more concrete than any price level. MyNearWallet is ceasing operation as of October 31. If you hold your NEAR there, you have to move the keys into another wallet beforehand, otherwise the familiar access is gone after the cut-off date. Cryptoticker covered the shutdown in detail on October 8.

Both processes have the same core, even though they have nothing to do with each other: access to a blockchain runs through services that can change owner or close. The blockchain itself remains, the access does not. That is exactly why a look into the wallet settings pays off now and not on October 30.

Buying NEAR in Germany: which route is open under MiCA

NEAR is available in Germany through regulated trading venues. Since the EU's MiCA regulation took effect, providers addressing retail customers in the EU need authorisation as a crypto asset service provider; a BaFin licence, or one from another member state used in Germany, is the minimum to look for in a buying route. Which venues carry NEAR and what fees they charge is shown in our crypto exchange comparison.

In the purchase itself, after a day with almost 12 percent of movement, the order type makes the difference. A market order in a thin order book buys at the next available price and can be filled well above the price you last saw. A limit order names your maximum price and may not be filled at all. With a daily range of $4.90 to $5.76, those are not rounding errors.

If you want not just to hold NEAR but to earn on it, you end up at staking. The proceeds are income and depend on the validator you delegate to; the lock-up period when you withdraw belongs in the calculation. Which platforms quote which terms is set out in our overview of staking platforms.

Tax on NEAR gains: holding period, exemption limit and the exchanges' reporting duty

In Germany, gains from the sale of crypto assets count as private disposals. After a holding period of one year the gain is tax-free; before that it counts towards your other income. The exemption limit for such gains is 1,000 euros in the calendar year and falls away entirely as soon as it is exceeded. Staking proceeds are valued at the time of receipt and have to be considered separately.

Documentation is what matters. Anyone rearranging a portfolio after a jump like the one from Friday to Sunday creates transactions whose acquisition data has to remain traceable next year. A tax tool or portfolio tracker takes over the logging; the duty to file correctly stays with you. The fact that trading venues pass data on to the tax authorities does not make clean records of your own unnecessary, it makes them more important.

The levels after the break below five: $4.90 below, $5.76 above

Three values are well founded for the coming days. Below sits the intraday low at $4.90: that is where the price slipped under the round five-dollar mark during October 13 before pulling back to around $5.09. The mark has therefore failed once and now sits just below the current price. Above sits the intraday high at $5.76, around 18 percent above the low. Whether the return above five dollars holds will show in whether the price leaves Tuesday's low untouched.

For context on the upside: the all-time high of $20.44 dates from January 2022. From today's price that is more than 70 percent away. The last time Cryptoticker wrote about NEAR, on October 10, the price stood at $4.93. The intraday low of October 13 at $4.90 was even below that, so the level around 5 dollars discussed then has been worked through. You will find the state of play at the time in the article on the volatility range of October 10.

Our assessment: a Nasdaq company at the access point, not at the blockchain

In the editorial team's view the acquisition is positive for NEAR over the medium term and overdrawn in the short term. Positive, because a listed owner brings money and accountability into an infrastructure that a small team ran at low prices until now; SVRN expressly announces investment in reliability and capacity. Overdrawn, because the network's daily figures were already not keeping pace on October 12: $122.8 million of daily volume at NEAR Intents stood against a cumulative total of $33.57 billion, and the token's trading volume of around $1.04 to $1.14 billion did not support a ten percent jump in a quiet overall market. The price path of October 12 has confirmed that reading.

Something else argues against it: the purchase price was not disclosed. Without it there is no judging whether SVRN bought cheaply or whether its own share price carried the cost. Assessing the acquisition as a piece of business is not possible with the figures published; assessing its direction is. Crypto assets can fall to a total loss; this assessment is not a recommendation to buy or sell.

NEAR's RPC plumbing: a Nasdaq company serves 3.5 billion requests

1. Open the wallet settings and note the RPC endpoint. If larger balances sit with a single provider, separate custody from access and put the keys on a device from the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check the venue and the order type before buying. Authorisation under MiCA, NEAR on offer, a limit order rather than a market order after a day with almost 12 percent of movement: the terms are in the exchange comparison.
3. Weigh the lock-up period against the yield when staking. The proceeds are taxable on receipt, and withdrawing takes time; you will find the terms at the staking platforms.

The primary source on the acquisition is the SEC Form 6-K from SVRN, Inc. of October 9, 2026. The volume figures for NEAR Intents are at DefiLlama.

(As of October 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)