Bitcoin rises above $81,000, while NEAR jumps 23% on Zcash swap traffic
Bitcoin extended a slow climb through the Asian session while regional equities and U.S. stock futures rose on progress in trade talks between Washington and Beijing.
Bitcoin traded just above $81,000 as of Monday Asian morning hours, up less than 1% over 24 hours and adding to the ground it has taken since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cleared a path for onchain trading of tokenized U.S. stocks on Thursday, CoinDesk data show.
NEAR was the standout among the major tokens, up roughly 23% to just above $4. The move traces to NEAR Intents, a swap service built on the NEAR blockchain that lets a wallet trade one token for another across different chains without the user having to move funds between them first.
Major consumer wallets, such as ZODL and Vizor, have plugged it in to offer ZEC swaps, and daily ZEC volume routed through the service jumped sixfold in a single in the past week. NEAR has become the routing layer for one of the most heavily traded tokens on the market, and its own token has followed the traffic.
Elsewhere, ZEC gained 3% to just above $1,500 and BNB 2% to nearly $777. Ether and HYPE each picked up about 2%, while XRP, DOGE, SOL and TRX rose 1% or less.
Equities set the tone through the Asian session. MSCI's Asia Pacific gauge climbed nearly 1%, led by technology shares in South Korea and Taiwan, after U.S. officials described talks with China as "very successful" ahead of a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping this week.
S&P 500 futures rose less than 1% and Nasdaq 100 contracts a little more. Brent crude fell 2% to just above $101 a barrel, its fourth straight decline, easing inflation worries and lifting Treasury futures.
Jeff Mei, chief operating officer at exchange BTSE, put the weekend’s bitcoin spike down to the SEC clearing onchain trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and the short squeeze that followed. He sees little on the calendar this week beyond remarks from Federal Reserve officials.
"I'd expect more volatility in the last few weeks leading up to that event," Mei said of the Fed's late-October meeting, which leaves more than a month of speeches and a single inflation print to shift positioning before then.
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Asanat Analysis — Why it matters
Bitcoin's move above $81,000 correlates with macroeconomic tailwinds—specifically, de-escalation signals in U.S.-China trade tensions. This pattern has held since 2023: risk-on sentiment in equities tends to precede or accompany Bitcoin strength, particularly when geopolitical friction eases. The 'slow climb through Asian session' suggests deliberate accumulation rather than FOMO-driven volatility, which historically has better staying power.
NEAR's 23% surge tied to Zcash swap traffic is a second-order signal worth parsing. Cross-chain liquidity events can indicate either: (1) genuine protocol activity migration, or (2) arbitrage mechanics between privacy-focused and high-throughput chains. The magnitude of the move suggests market participants are reading this as fundamental utility rather than noise, though it warrants scrutiny on whether volume sustained post-spike. This also reflects ongoing fragmentation where smaller L1s can still command narrative when utility activity concentrates briefly.