NEAR is a blockchain, a shared record of who owns what, kept by many independent computers instead of by one company. Programs can run on that record, and they do exactly what their code says without anyone signing off. These programs are called smart contracts, and everything built on NEAR, from exchanges to games, is made of them.

Every time you use one of those programs, you pay a small fee in NEAR, the network's own token. Think of it as a toll: the road is there whether or not you drive on it, but each trip costs something, and the toll is paid in the road's own currency.

The computers that keep the record are called validators. To take part, a validator locks up NEAR as a deposit, the way a tenant puts money down before getting the keys. In return, validators are paid in newly created NEAR.

NEAR has been running since 2020. Its own site sells it on speed, with a new block every 0.6 seconds and payments final in 1.2 seconds, and increasingly as the payment rails for AI agents. It also runs NEAR Intents, a separate product for trading across different blockchains. Intents is a business of its own, and its numbers are not NEAR's numbers.

The token does three jobs. You spend it on fees, validators lock it up as their deposit, and the network pays validators with newly created tokens.

That last job matters most to you as a holder. The network creates new NEAR every year and hands it to validators, so the supply keeps growing. The white paper says this reward is paid "regardless of the number of fees collected or burned." Validators are paid by printing, not by what users spend.

Fees work the other way. Of every fee, 70% is burned, which means destroyed for good, and 30% goes to the developer whose program you used, a little like a royalty. Nothing goes to a company, a foundation or a treasury.

So owning NEAR means owning a slice of a supply that grows through printing and shrinks through burning. Whether your slice gets bigger or smaller depends on which of the two is winning. The next sections measure both.

Over the past year, people paid $1,286,077 in fees to use NEAR. That is the network's whole income, and every other number on this page leans on it.

It has not been a steady number. On a typical day in 2024, fees came to about $21,400. On a typical day in 2025 it was about $9,100, and so far in 2026 it has been about $1,900. Fees fell by roughly nine tenths in two years, like a shop whose daily takings go from a busy market stall to a quiet corner kiosk.

In April 2026 daily fees dropped by about three quarters almost overnight, from around $3,000 to under $1,000, and stayed low for weeks. In the final days of the data they climbed to about $5,000 a day. A good week is not a trend, but it is the strongest run of the year.

For you, the point is simple. Fees are the only thing the network earns, and the burn that works in your favour is a fixed share of them. When fees shrink, so does the one force pushing back against new supply.

Take a single dollar of fees. Seventy cents is burned, 30 cents goes to the developer of the program you used, and nothing goes anywhere else. The public data has only separated these shares since June 2026, but in those months they match the design to the cent.

The burn is the part that reaches you. When tokens are destroyed, each one left is a slightly bigger share of the whole, the same way a company buying back its own shares makes yours count for more. Since June 2026 the burn has come to $116,142, and at September's pace it would reach about $580,000 over a full year.

The project describes more than this. Its February 2026 post on the token's economics talks about revenue directed to NEAR buybacks and a "deflationary economic flywheel," and credits NEAR Intents with more than a million in buybacks. None of that appears in the chain's own fee data, where the network's own take is exactly zero, day after day.

For you, the burn is real and you can see it working. It is also small, and the buybacks sit outside anything the chain itself records.

Now set the burn against the printing. The network is creating about 28.9 million new NEAR a year, worth roughly $76 million at the June 2026 price of $2.64. The burn, at September's pace, destroys about $580,000 worth a year. It cancels out less than 1% of what is printed.

That makes NEAR an inflating currency, by a wide margin. It is like a central bank that prints more than a hundred notes for every one it takes out of circulation. Each year roughly 2% more NEAR exists, so your share of the whole gets smaller unless you add to it.

The white paper allows for the opposite outcome. It says inflation can turn negative "if there are enough fees burned." At today's rate of printing, that would take fees about 85 times larger than the past year's.

In 2025 NEAR halved its printing. Until then the network could create up to 5% new tokens a year; now the ceiling is 2.5%. For holders that is good news, because less printing means less dilution. How it happened matters more.

In August 2025 the change went to a community vote and failed, falling short of the two-thirds it needed. The change was then written into a software release, nearcore 2.9.0, published on 21 October. Validators approved it by installing the update, and once enough had, the lower rate switched on on 30 October 2025.

The network's own supply data breaks on exactly that day. New tokens were being created at about 4.7% a year before it and about 2.2% after. That is how the rules are written: the binding step is the validators' upgrade, not the public vote. It is a bit like a board overruling its shareholders because the bylaws allow it.

For you, the lesson cuts both ways. This time the change favoured holders. The same route could carry one that does not.

Many tokens come with a schedule of insiders' coins still waiting to unlock, a queue of future sellers standing between you and the price. NEAR does not. Every allocation, including the team's and the early investors', has finished unlocking.

Early backers received about 237 million NEAR and the core team about 140 million. All of it is now free to trade. For you, that means no large block of supply is waiting in a drawer to be sold.

The totals line up almost perfectly. There are 1,297,094,652 NEAR in existence and 1,297,094,644 in circulation, a difference of eight tokens. Almost nothing is held back.

What remains is the printing described above, and it has no end date. NEAR has no maximum supply. The unlocks are finished, but the supply is not.

Total value locked, or TVL, is the money people have deposited into programs on NEAR: lending pools, exchanges and similar products. It is a rough measure of how much the network is trusted to hold, the way a bank's deposits say something about the bank.

NEAR's deposits peaked at $481.7 million on 9 May 2022. On 22 September 2026 they stood at $199.9 million, 58.5% below that peak. The network holds well under half of what it once did.

The recent path is uneven. Deposits spent most of 2026 between about $80 million and $160 million, and climbed back to about $200 million only in the last week of the data. For you, that is the highest level in a year, but it rests on a few days.

NEAR Intents holds a similar amount, about $206 million. Those are deposits in a separate product and are not counted in the chain's figure.

In June 2026 the market valued all NEAR at $3.41 billion. Over the most recent 90 days, fees ran at a pace of $637,759 a year. Divide one by the other and the price is 5,346 times what the network earns in a year.

In everyday terms, that is like paying $5,346 for a vending machine that takes in one dollar a year. Even against the fuller past-year total of $1,286,077, the multiple is about 2,650. The price is from June and the fees from September, so treat the comparison as approximate.

The price cannot be explained by current fees. It rests on the belief that NEAR will be used far more in the future than it is today. That is a bet you can make, but it is a bet on what NEAR becomes, not on what it earns now.