NEAR Leads AI Crypto Rally As Grayscale Says Sector More Than Doubled Broader Market's Gain

NEAR Protocol (NEAR) edged lower on Saturday after Grayscale highlighted that the token led a September rally in artificial intelligence (AI) tokens, with the firm’s AI crypto sector gaining, more than double the broader market's rise.According to a research note published on Friday, Grayscale said that the broader crypto market rose around 24%, while its own AI crypto sector stood at 54%.Grayscale added that NEAR jumped 183% during September, while other AI-linked tokens like Venice (VVV) climbed 70%, World (WLD) rose 47%, and Bittensor (TAO) added 37%. traded over $4, rising over 151% over the past 30 days, at the time of writing. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around NEAR remained in the ‘bullish’ zone, with chatter at ‘high’ levels over the past day.AI Leads Grayscale’s Crypto SectorsThe rally made AI the best-performing category across Grayscale’s six major crypto sectors, including Currencies, Smart Contract Platforms, Financials, Consumer & Culture, Utilities & Services, and Artificial Intelligence. Utilities & Services ranked second with a 47% gain, the firm added. Even after the rally, AI remains the smallest of the six sectors.Grayscale Head of Research Zach Pandl wrote that the category is worth about $15 billion, and “we believe the AI sector could produce one or more major winners over the next five years.”Pandl wrote that AI’s development “remains concentrated among a handful of companies.” He said public blockchains could help balance that by providing “open infrastructure for agent payments, identity, private compute, and verifiable records.”Grayscale said that investors were beginning to price in the potential role for blockchain as infrastructure for the emerging AI-agent economy — with high on September 27.AI Agents Put Blockchain Rails In FocusLast month, a BlackRock whitepaper mentioned that agentic AI and machine-to-machine payments will likely lift demand for blockchains and other programmable payment systems. Blackrock said Ethereum (ETH) and Circle’s (CRCL) Arc blockchain were set to gain from the rise in AI agentic payments.NEAR ExploitThe September rally was followed by a setback for the NEAR ecosystem last week. A bug was detected in NEAR Intent’s Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interaction with the protocol’s smart contract that led to losses of about $3.8 million.NEAR Intents said in a post on Thursday that “These funds will be compensated in full,” adding that the contract-side vulnerability had been patched already.NEAR is up over 211% so far this year and rose over 55% in the last 12 months.