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Bitcoin trades at $77,186 today, down 2.43% over the week, but the jump of the week is NEAR Protocol (NEAR), which risen 31% today, and 51% over the last week.
The NEAR pump is driven by the announcement of new features, including private on-chain payroll, cross-chain payments across 35+ chains, and a new AI prompt-privacy rollout that automatically anonymizes personal information on the AI-focused chain.
The NEAR move shows how real infrastructure can drive real price action.
But for investors who watched that setup materialize in hindsight, the question is now: where does the next story come from? And for that, the clue is in Bitcoin’s transaction rate – currently limited to 7 transactions per second (TPS) – and what can be done about it.
Which is likely why a staggering $32.7 million has entered the Bitcoin Hyper (HYPER) presale, with HYPER promising to rethink how we think about BTC. HYPER, priced at $0.01368 and offering a staking APY of 36%, is the gas token for a Layer 2 that brings Solana speeds to the cryptocurrency that started it all.
How Bitcoin Hyper Fixes BTC’s Speeds
Bitcoin Hyper is designed to bring an end to Bitcoin’s in-built limitations, in particular the slow transactions which limit BTC from being used in the real world for quick payments, by introducing a Layer 2 solution that processes transactions with extremely low latency.
The project, which is expected to launch on exchanges before the end of the year, integrates the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as a Layer 2 sitting above Bitcoin, which, along with offering 1000+ TPS, also means smart contracts and decentralized applications can exist on top of Bitcoin – something impossible on native Bitcoin.
Users bridge their BTC into HYPER, and are then in a Solana-like environment, but critically, transactions are batched and then settled on Bitcoin, inheriting the base chain’s long-trusted security layer. The decentralized, non-custodial Canonical Bridge lets users move BTC across the bridge, which mints equivalent tokens on Layer 2 that are redeemable back to native BTC at any time.
Smart contracts can be written in Rust (familiar to most Solana developers), and the ecosystem also plans to support DeFi applications, including swaps, lending, and staking.
In short? BTC can still form the basis of payments – but now they happen quickly enough to happen at cash registers, rather than waiting 10 minutes to confirm a payment.
The smart contracts have already been audited by Coinsult and SpyWolf, suggesting the protocol is close to launch.
Why HYPER Is The Best Crypto to Buy in 2026
HYPER’s roadmap puts mainnet deployment in 2026, with Canonical Bridge activation and first dApp deployments on Layer 2 following shortly after. We also expect token listings, targeted for 2026 and aligned with the completion of the presale.
The Bitcoin Layer 2 sector remains ridiculously less crowded than Ethereum’s equivalent market. Stacks, Arbitrum, Base, Mantle… Layer 2s are everywhere, but Bitcoin has been left behind. Solana on top of Bitcoin is a technical approach that makes more sense the more you look at it, and the payment-first aim of HYPER ties the project directly back to Satoshi’s original peer-to-peer cash vision.
Bitcoin has the foundation.
Hyper has the horsepower. 🔥⚡️https://t.co/VNG0P4GuDo pic.twitter.com/oPtHoivRRZ
— Bitcoin Hyper (@BTC_Hyper2) May 22, 2026
Together, these components turn Bitcoin Hyper into a high-performance layer for developers and users who want to build, trade, and interact at scale, while still anchored to Bitcoin’s unmatched security and brand trust.
That combination is what makes the best crypto to buy argument coherent – and the 36% staking APY is a nice bonus on top.
The Bitcoin Problem Has a 2026 Answer
NEAR’s week makes the case better than any other chart. When real infrastructure ships and solves a genuine bottleneck, the market changes fast.
Bitcoin’s bottleneck – 7 TPS, no smart contracts, no viable payments layer – has been sitting unaddressed while Ethereum and Solana scaled past it. Bitcoin Hyper is the clearest-built attempt yet to fix that from the inside.
With $32.7 million already committed in presale and mainnet coming soon, HYPER is one to watch.
