The third week of May saw a long-awaited rebound in profit-making momentum sweep across the crypto market. With Bitcoin oscillating within a key range, the ensuing sentiment spillover energized the altcoin market. Three dominant narratives defined this week’s price action: privacy coins, led by ZEC, staged a broad-based rally amid incrementally improving regulatory expectations; the Perp DEX narrative, spearheaded by HYPE, continued to attract sustained capital inflows; and NEAR carved out an independent run, backed by solid AI infrastructure fundamentals. According to HTX platform data, top-performing assets over the past week (May 18–24) spanned multiple core sectors — including privacy, AI, DeFi, and Perp DEX — with the newly listed ZEST emerging as the week’s standout dark horse, posting a staggering 131% gain.
On-Chain Derivatives Narrative Strengthens as Perp DEX Heats Up, BTCFi and DeFi Rally
One of the week’s key narratives centered on the decentralized perpetual exchange sector, with HYPE as the top gainer. As market volatility picked up, user demand for high-efficiency, high-leverage, and low-slippage trading environments intensified. Consequently, the market is repricing the value of on-chain financial infrastructure. Amid the continued advancement of BTC Layer 2 solutions, staking yields, restaking, and on-chain asset expansion, BTCFi is emerging as a major incremental growth sector — making it the next frontier after the ETH-ecosystem DeFi.
● HYPE (Hyperliquid): Up 38% on the week, HYPE stands as the leading representative of on-chain derivatives trading infrastructure. Hyperliquid is a high-performance L1 built from the ground up, with a vision to create a fully on-chain, open financial system.
● ZEST (Zest Protocol): A newly listed asset that surged 131% this week, making it the week’s top gainer. Zest Protocol is a Bitcoin lending protocol. As a new BTCFi-focused token, ZEST’s explosive performance reflects the market’s continued enthusiasm for the Bitcoin Finance (BTCFi) narrative.
● ONDO (Ondo Finance): Up 28% on the week, ONDO is a flagship RWA/DeFi asset. Long regarded as a key representative of real-world assets (RWA) and on-chain yield protocols, ONDO provides the infrastructure for securities tokenization and the development of protocols that support these assets, such as Flux Finance.
Privacy Sector Bounces Back: ZEC and NIL Rally as Capital Reassesses Anonymity Value
Another highly distinctive theme this week was the broad-based recovery of the privacy sector. As on-chain regulatory scrutiny intensifies, asset traceability improves, and user demand for privacy protection grows, the market has begun to revisit the value of anonymous transactions, zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), and privacy infrastructure.
● ZEC (Zcash): Up 22% on the week, ZEC is a veteran privacy asset. Compared to smaller-cap speculative plays, ZEC benefits from a more established technical foundation and greater market familiarity, making it a natural first mover as the privacy narrative reawakens.
● NIL (Nillion): Up 60% on the week. Nillion is a private computation and storage network, built for AI and data applications. The network leverages Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to enable data computation and storage while preserving privacy, unlocking use cases such as private personalized AI, encrypted databases, and other privacy-preserving applications.
AI Narrative Momentum: NEAR Leads as Infrastructure AI Assets Attract Capital
AI remains, without question, one of the most enduring market narratives. Looking at performance over recent weeks, the AI sector continues to appear with high frequency on HTX’s top-gainers list, demonstrating far greater staying power than shorter-cycle themes. As AI Agents, on-chain compute infrastructure, and decentralized inference networks continue to evolve, attention is shifting toward the players that can truly support real-world AI adoption.
● NEAR (NEAR Protocol): Up 56% this week. NEAR is a composite asset that combines public blockchain, developer ecosystem, and AI infrastructure narratives. NEAR Protocol serves as the foundational architecture for the open network, providing a decentralized application platform that delivers a clean and user-friendly experience for both developers and end users.
● GENIUS (Genius): Up 54% on the week. Genius Terminal is the first private and ultimate on-chain terminal, a trading operating system (OS) built for professional users. It is designed to serve those who want DeFi functionality without the friction of complex interactions.
Structural Market Shift Prompts Strategic Asset Selection
This week’s market action has made one thing clear: the market has visibly shifted away from single-theme speculation and into a phase of “multiple parallel narratives with structurally allocated capital.” The on-chain derivatives infrastructure represented by HYPE, the privacy sector recovery led by ZEC, and the large-cap AI asset reevaluation driven by NEAR together form the core upside momentum of the week.
As a global leading digital asset trading platform, HTX continuously monitors evolving market trends, maintaining a sharp focus on key sectors including AI, BTCFi, DeFi, RWA, and privacy infrastructure. HTX consistently lists quality and high-potential assets, helping users more effectively capture structural opportunities amid complex market conditions. As the market presents new narrative rotation, assets with genuine long-term value and robust ecosystem support may well emerge as the primary focus of capital flows in the future.
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