One of the biggest shifts I’m noticing right now in crypto is how the AI narrative is coming back but in a much more selective and structured way this time.
Earlier cycles felt like everything labeled “AI” moved together on pure hype. Now it feels different. The market is starting to filter out noise and focus more on real infrastructure, automation, and systems that can actually support AI at scale.
$NEAR is a good example of that shift. It’s no longer just being looked at as another Layer 1, but more like infrastructure that could realistically support AI-native applications. That focus on speed, usability and scalability is starting to matter again, and you can see it in its momentum, with $NEAR up around +16%.
$FET is also picking up again as attention returns to AI agents and autonomous systems. The idea of agents that can execute tasks and coordinate independently is slowly becoming a real narrative again, not just a concept. That’s showing up in its price action too, with $FET moving roughly +10%.
What stands out to me most is how capital is rotating. It’s not random anymore, it’s clustering around infrastructure-heavy AI projects and real utility rather than pure storytelling.
Even exchanges are adapting to this shift in real time. Bitget has been leaning into this trend with its unified AI trading ecosystem, which has already surpassed 1M users and $1.2B in AI agent trading volume. It just shows how quickly AI is becoming embedded not only in tokens, but also in how trading itself is evolving.
If this continues, we might be early in a phase where AI in crypto stops being just a narrative, and starts becoming actual market structure.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/near-protocol/
