• NEAR price tapped double-digit gains on Monday after news of a partnership with Alibaba.
• The NEAR token rose to highs of $1.61, a 3-week high going back to early June.
• NEAR’s upside followed news of NEAR Foundation’s partnership with Alibaba Cloud to support Web3 in Asia and the Middle East.

The NEAR Foundation, the non-profit organisation helping to develop the NEAR blockchain, has struck a major partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the computing and storage arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba.

NEAR Protocol price jumped double digits following the news, soaring from $1.35 to $1.61 early Monday. The 3-week high for NEAR/USD comes as the broader crypto market looks to build on last week’s upward momentum that got legs from the spot Bitcoin ETF news.

NEAR Foundation partners Alibaba Cloud

The NEAR Foundation will be partnering with Alibaba Cloud to advance Web3 adoption in Asia and the Middle East. 

According to an announcement from the Switzerland-based non-profit, the collaboration grants NEAR access to the cloud computing provider’s developer ecosystem.

More developers across Asia and the Middle East will tap into the network as they build on the NEAR protocol. Specifically, the partnership means NEAR Protocol developers can now easily leverage Alibaba Cloud’s “plug-and-play” infrastructure.

Users will also benefit from the remote procedure calls (RPC) as-a-service offering, allowing for multi-chain access to blockchain data and transactions.

The partnership with Alibaba Cloud comes just days after the NEAR Foundation teamed up with Vortex Gaming, the Web3 subsidiary of South Korea-based gaming company INVEN. The partnership looks to enhance Web3 gaming on Vortex Gaming and the NEAR game ecosystem, including via offline hackathons.

Vortex Gaming will tap into both NEAR’s layer-1 protocol, and the Blockchain Operating System (BOS), an open source OS for the open web. NEAR Foundation announced BOS in March, bringing into the ecosystem a multi-chain compatible layer for browsing and discovering the Open web.