Van de Poppe said he wouldn’t be surprised to see NEAR hit $4.50-$5.00 in the next few weeks, suggesting an over 100% price increase
- NEAR jumped over 10% on Sunday, and analyst Michaël van de Poppe said its correlation to Zcash was one-on-one.
- Zcash passed Hyperliquid to become the top altcoin, with record $2.4 billion open interest.
- Bankless founder David Hoffman's rotation from ETH to ZEC and LIT in May was paying off as both tokens rallied in tandem with NEAR.
NEAR Protocol (NEAR) surged more than 10% on Sunday, with analyst Michaël van de Poppe saying the move was no coincidence. He pointed to almost a one-to-one correlation between NEAR and Zcash (ZEC).
“It’s just a matter of time before we’ll be seeing a big move upwards on $NEAR,” van de Poppe wrote on X. He added that ZEC “has already made a new all-time high” and that “the correlation between the two is nearly 1:1.” He said he “wouldn’t be surprised” to see NEAR go to $4.50 to $5.00 in the next few weeks.
NEAR’s price was trading at $2.42 at the time of writing. If van de Poppe’s prediction held, NEAR would see an 87% to 107% increase.
On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around NEAR remained in the ‘bullish’ zone, while chatter around it shifted to ‘extremely high’ from ‘high’ over the past day.
The Rotation Trade Behind It
The NEAR-ZEC pairing was part of a larger trend of traders moving away from Ethereum (ETH) and into smaller tokens that have outperformed it.
Crypto analyst Ignas noted on X that Bankless founder David Hoffman, who had sold off his entire ETH position in May after questioning the network's "ultrasound money" narrative, rotated into Lit (LIT) and ZEC, which have since gained roughly 369% and 110%, respectively, according to the chart he posted.
NEAR, on the other hand, added about 54%, while ETH gained just over 8% during the same period.
“Despite the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), it was also close to $ETH bottom, but active crypto investors’ goal is always to outperform BTC and ETH,” Ignas wrote.
Why Zcash Matters Here?
Van de Poppe’s call was based on ZEC’s recent rally, where it hit a new milestone on Sunday when the privacy coin overtook Hyperliquid (HYPE) to become the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
ZEC’s 14-day relative strength index (RSI), a momentum indicator in which readings above 70 imply an asset is overbought, was at 82.18, and the token was trading at more than 2.5 times its 200-day moving average. If NEAR was tracking ZEC as closely as van de Poppe suggested, a sharp reversal in one could rapidly spill into the other.
The rally also came as analyst Ted Pillows flagged that altcoin open interest (OI) had surpassed Bitcoin open interest for the first time since December 2024.
Read also: Mark Yusko Dumps 90% Of Solana, Warns Of More Pain For BTC — But Half His Wealth In Still In Bitcoin
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