NEAR prices rise 20% to highest level since May 2022

NEAR prices have risen 20% in the last 24 hours to $7, their highest level since May 2022. The price increase comes as NEAR's founder will be speaking at Nvidia's AI conference next week, and NEAR is about to launch Near Tasks, a new AI-focused product. NEAR's price has nearly doubled since March 5, as the hype surrounding Nvidia's (NVDA) upcoming annual conference continues to drive AI-related tokens higher. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder and CEO of the NEAR protocol, will participate in a panel discussion at the conference called "Transforming AI," which will be moderated by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. His presence and the upcoming release of Near Tasks, an artificial intelligence (AI) business, has sparked discussion about whether NEAR will be working closely with Nvidia in the future, and NEAR appears to be the only crypto-related company that will be speaking on the main panel. According to CoinMarketCap, NEAR's gains have been mirrored in the crypto AI market over the past week, with fetch.ai (FET), the graph (GRT), and singularityNET (AGIX) all up more than 30%. The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is up 9.18% over the same period.