Early on Wednesday, NEAR Protocol (NEAR) seems to be trading steady after eking out gains even amid the bearish mood in the wider crypto sector after market leader Bitcoin failed to hold above the all-important $50k level during the previous session. At the time of writing, NEAR/USD is trading at around $13.43.

NEAR has had a good week and is set to be one of the strongest performers in the market for the month of December. Over the past week, NEAR Protocol’s value has strengthened by nearly 35% – a remarkable gain considering most of the market was experiencing sluggish moves as leading coins BTC and ETH lacked much traction among buyers.

Watch Out For NEAR Protocol’s DeFi Growth in 2022

One of the biggest reasons that drove up NEAR’s value was its integration with Terra blockchain, which brought its leading stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) into the NEAR Protocol ecosystem. This move gave a big boost to its DeFi capabilities, and although it is nowhere close to the leading spots on the DeFi board in terms of TVL, there is much promise for it to climb up in the rankings following this move.

Currently, NEAR Protocol ranks 33 in terms of DeFi TVL as per data on Defi Llama, with a TVL of over $120 million in its two DeFi dApps Ref Finance and Meta Pool. With only two dApps to offer, the PoS blockchain network saw its DeFi TVL surge by over 24% in the past week following the introduction of UST.

Looking ahead, we could see NEAR making quite the headway, powered by the rising interest in DeFi within the crypto market. The NEAR Protocol’s Grant DAO recently announced an investment in DEX DODO, picking it to become the blue-chip decentralized exchange within its ecosystem. DODO is all set to receive $7.5 million in funding from the blockchain’s DAO and will leverage Aurora, NEAR’s EVM compatibility and scaling solution for higher levels of scalability and adoption.

NEAR/USD Technical Analysis

Recent analysis by Coin Bureau offers a bullish outlook for NEAR Protocol. In the latest YouTube video, the show’s host Guy discussed how NEAR’s fundamentals are aligning with upward price action. Although, he does caution that its price could see a correction to $12-13 levels to experience some consolidation before taking off higher.

On the H4 chart of NEAR/USD, smaller moving averages as well as the MACD are flashing sell signs for now. However, 100 EMA, 200 EMA as well as the Stochastic and momentum indicator reveal a bullish bias.

NEAR Protocol’s price is sitting just under the pivot point at $13.65 and quite some distance from the immediate support at $10.91. We need to see the entry of some more buyers into the market for NEAR to test the pivot point and rise higher.