NEAR Falls Almost 8 Percent After a 62 Percent Week: What to Check on Perps, Buying Route and Holding Period

NEAR Protocol falls sharply on September 24, 2026, yet remains one of the strongest performers among the top 25 cryptocurrencies over the week. Anyone holding NEAR, or looking to buy in now, therefore has to judge two things at once: a short-term pullback, and a rally built on a very particular product that is not readily accessible in Europe.

This article puts the numbers in context, explains what triggered the upswing, and then works through the points you as an investor in Germany can actually check: the buying route under MiCA, custody, the holding period, and the records the tax office will want to see.

NEAR price on September 24, 2026: The figures from our own survey

cryptoticker.io retrieved the following values itself on September 24, 2026, between 08:47 and 08:50 UTC, via CoinGecko's public programming interface, both calls returning status code 200. Because three minutes lay between the two calls, individual values differ. We give them as a range and do not smooth them.

• Price: $4.22, and around €3.69 on venues with a euro pair.
• Change over 24 hours: minus 6.9 to minus 7.9 percent.
• Change over seven days: plus 55.2 to plus 61.8 percent.
• Change over 30 days: plus 118.6 percent.
• Daily range: $4.09 at the low, $4.79 at the high.
• Trading volume over 24 hours: around $2.15 billion.
• Market capitalisation: around $5.51 billion, 23rd place.
• Distance from the all-time high of $20.44 set on January 16, 2022: 79.3 percent.

Two of these figures deserve attention. The first is the distance from the all-time high. Even after a month of plus 118.6 percent, NEAR trades around four fifths below its price of early 2022. Reading the current move as a return to old highs underestimates how far that road still runs. The second is the ratio of trading volume to market capitalisation: with $2.15 billion of turnover against $5.51 billion of market value, almost forty percent of the market value arithmetically changes hands in a single day. Turnover on that scale belongs to a phase in which short-term traders set the price, not long-term holders. The running price action and the key levels can be found in our NEAR price prediction.

What triggered the rally: confidential perpetual futures via Hyperliquid

Last week's upswing has an identifiable cause. NEAR has switched on confidential perpetual futures contracts, known as confidential perps, which run over an existing connection to the derivatives venue Hyperliquid. The trade press dates the launch to September 17 or September 18, 2026; the accounts differ by a day, and we were unable to confirm an official date on the project's own pages.

A perpetual future, or perp, is a futures contract with no expiry date. It tracks the price of an underlying asset but runs on indefinitely, as long as the margin holds. To stop its price drifting away from the spot price, the two sides of the market pay each other a balancing amount at fixed intervals, the funding rate. Whoever stands on the crowded side pays; whoever takes the other side receives.

According to consistent reports in the trade press, the offering covers more than 50 perp markets, permits leverage of up to forty times and accepts collateral from more than 35 different blockchains. Positions continue to be executed at Hyperliquid. In the United States and Canada the product is not available, according to Altcoin Buzz. The underlying confidential intents system held around $70 million in deposited value on September 15, 2026.

The technical substructure is the part NEAR itself puts front and centre: the project's official intents pages describe NEAR as a universal transaction layer for an economy driven by AI agents, in which so-called solvers compete to find the best execution for a desired end state. How this mechanism works for a simple cross-chain swap is set out in our analysis of NEAR Intents.

What "confidential" means for these futures contracts, and what it does not

Precision pays here, because the term carries further in marketing than in the technology. On the available descriptions, the confidentiality arises because trading activity runs over a shielded NEAR shard, that is, a separate section of the chain connected to the main network by a bridge with a trusted execution environment. What is hidden is the asset traded, the position size, the entry time and the direction. The public link between deposit, account and position is severed.

What that does not mean: the position does not disappear. The contract is still executed at Hyperliquid and remains part of its market infrastructure. Selective disclosure is explicitly provided for in the descriptions, but which body may decrypt under which conditions has so far not been named in the public documents. That is no accusation against the project. It remains an open question you should carry with you in your own risk assessment.

For you in Germany, one sober sentence follows: confidentiality towards the public is not confidentiality towards the tax office. Your record-keeping obligations for tax purposes remain unchanged, regardless of whether a third party can see your position in a public data set. Anyone who relies on the shielding and therefore keeps no records takes on a problem that has nothing to do with the technology.

Funding rate and liquidation: the mechanics behind forty times leverage

Forty times leverage sounds like an opportunity and is first of all an arithmetic problem. At forty times leverage, a price move of 2.5 percent against your position equals the complete loss of the collateral you posted. Liquidation, the forced closure by the system, sets in earlier in practice, because maintenance margin and fees are taken into account.

Hold that against the numbers from our survey. In the past 24 hours alone, NEAR has run a range between $4.09 and $4.79. That is around 17 percent between low and high. A position with forty times leverage would have been stopped out several times in this window depending on entry, and in both directions. Leverage does not improve your hit rate; it shortens the time until the decision.

On top of that comes the funding rate. In a phase where many are betting on rising prices, the buy side pays the sell side continuously. That payment falls due regardless of whether the price moves your way, and it adds up noticeably over days. Anyone holding a leveraged position for a week should have estimated the cumulative funding payment beforehand. Which venues for perpetual futures bring which fee models, leverage limits and safeguards is set side by side in our comparison of perp DEX platforms.

Buying route under MiCA: which venues quote NEAR in euros

Our retrieval on September 24, 2026 lists, among others, five venues with a euro pair for NEAR: Bitvavo, Kraken, Bit2Me, WhiteBIT and OKX. The price there was uniformly around €3.69. That list describes where trading takes place, and says nothing about which of these providers is allowed to take you on as a customer in Germany.

That question is answered by the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA. A company providing crypto-asset services to customers in the European Union needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. In Germany it is granted by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority. Every authorisation granted is published in the Federal Gazette and entered in the supervisor's company database; Europe-wide, the European Securities and Markets Authority maintains a register of its own.

From this follows a checking step you can take yourself in a few minutes. Look up your venue's full company name, not the brand name of the app, in the supervisor's company database or in the European register. If the company is listed there with authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider, you know your legal position in a dispute. What the authorisation requires in detail and where its limits lie is explained on BaFin's information page on crypto-asset services. An overview of the venues that regularly serve the German market can be found in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

One point belongs to honesty here: the confidential perp offering that carried this rally is not a product of a trading platform authorised in Germany. It runs over decentralised infrastructure, and MiCA does not capture decentralised protocols without an identifiable operator in the same way it captures an authorised company. Anyone trading there does so without the protections that authorisation brings, and without a body to which a complaint could be addressed.

Tax in Germany: holding period on spot NEAR and the open question on perps

For a direct purchase of NEAR held privately, the legal position is clear. The transaction falls under private disposals within the meaning of section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell within a year of buying, the gain is taxable; if more than a year lies between purchase and sale, it remains tax-free. An exemption limit of €1,000 applies to the sum of all private disposals in a year. Exceed it and the entire gain is taxable, not merely the excess.

With perps the matter is different, and pretending to certainty here helps nobody. How perpetual futures on crypto assets are to be classified for retail investors, whether as a forward transaction within the meaning of section 20 of the Income Tax Act or as a private disposal, is disputed in practice and depends on the specific design of the product. The classification decides whether the one-year period applies at all and how losses may be offset. That is a question for your tax adviser, and before your first trade rather than in May of the following year.

What applies in both cases: you need unbroken records of the time, quantity, price and equivalent value of every single transaction, including funding payments. In a shielded trading environment you do not get that statement reconstructed automatically from a public data set. Export the records as you go and file them. Which tools bring transactions together and deliver a holding-period calculation on a first-in, first-out basis is shown in our comparison of crypto tax software.

Custody and staking: what delegating does to your holding period

NEAR uses a proof-of-stake procedure. You can delegate your holdings to a validator and receive rewards on an ongoing basis. For tax purposes these rewards are to be valued at the time they accrue as other income under section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act, for which a separate exemption limit of €256 a year applies. The market value on the day of accrual is at the same time your acquisition value for a later sale of those rewards.

The earlier worry that staking extends the holding period of the coins deployed from one year to ten has been cleared up. The tax administration has made clear that the extended period is not to be applied to staking and lending. For the holdings you deploy, the one-year period therefore stands.

More important in practice is the withdrawal period. Delegated NEAR holdings are not available immediately after you cancel. Only after a waiting time of several epochs can you withdraw them. In a market that runs 17 percent between low and high in one day, that is a risk you should know about: anyone who wants to sell into falling prices and first has to wait sells at a price they did not choose. Check your validator's current waiting time before you delegate, not when you want to get out.

The NEAR@3.33 incentive programme and why it matters again now

In September 2026 NEAR set up an incentive programme under which allocated claims are converted into NEAR provided the price holds a set threshold over a defined period. We broke the conditions down in a separate analysis of the incentive programme.

One aspect of it is notable for today's pullback: programmes whose payout is tied to holding a price threshold create an additional vested interest in the price around that threshold. As long as NEAR trades well above it at $4.22, that is theoretical. Should the price approach the threshold, it will no longer be. Anyone holding claims from the programme should read the conditions rather than quote them from memory.

Method of our survey: 25 coins and five euro venues counted

cryptoticker.io conducted this analysis itself on September 24, 2026. The method in one sentence: on September 24, 2026 at 08:47 UTC we retrieved the market overview of the 25 largest cryptocurrencies and at 08:50 UTC the individual data set for NEAR Protocol via CoinGecko's public programming interface, both calls returning status code 200, and from these counted the price changes and the venues listed with a euro pair.

Objects examined: 25 entries of the market overview, of which 21 assessable assets after deducting the stablecoins, plus one individual data set for NEAR with the venues listed within it. In this count NEAR, at minus 6.9 to minus 7.9 percent, was the biggest daily loser among the assessable assets; over seven days NEAR, at plus 55.2 to plus 61.8 percent, was at the same time in front.

Whether the five venues named hold authorisation as crypto-asset service providers, and whether they accept customers from Germany, does not emerge from price data. You have to take that step yourself in the supervisor's register. Nor were we able to cross-check the trade press accounts of the confidential perp offering against an official publication by the project; NEAR's product pages describe the intents architecture but name neither the number of markets nor the leverage limit.

Levels above and below: how to measure the pullback

Levels are not a forecast but measuring points at which you can anchor your own decision. Four of them follow from the figures gathered.

On the downside, the daily low at $4.09 is the first reference point. Below it, the pullback loses the character of profit-taking within an intact move. The second lies at around $3.15, the closing price of September 17, that is, the level immediately after the perp offering launched. Should the price fall back there, the market would have given up the entire valuation of that trigger again.

On the upside, the daily high at $4.79 is the nearest level. Above it lies the round five-dollar mark, to which analysts have repeatedly pointed in recent days. Such price targets are the assessments of individual houses and not documented quantities; we report them as what they are. Against that stands the counter-position that the move is technically overbought after plus 118.6 percent in thirty days, and that a pullback was the likely rather than the surprising scenario.

For anyone working to a savings-plan logic, this whole paragraph is secondary. For everyone else: write your level down before you buy, not afterwards.

Checking the NEAR pullback: what to take away

Three steps that can be done today.

1. Check your buying route before you react to the pullback. Look up your venue's full company name in the supervisor's company database or in the European register and establish whether authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider is in place. Which providers regularly serve the German market is shown in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Leave the leverage alone until you have estimated the funding rate. At forty times leverage a counter-move of 2.5 percent suffices for the total loss of your collateral, and NEAR has run a range of around 17 percent today alone. If you still want to use perpetual futures, compare fees, leverage limits and safeguards in the perp DEX comparison.
3. Secure your records, especially in shielded trading environments. Export the time, quantity, price and equivalent value of every transaction as you go, and track the holding period separately for each purchase. The tools for this are in our comparison of crypto tax software.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)