Layer-1 blockchain NEAR's native token (NEAR) has almost doubled since March 5 as the hype surrounding Nvidia's (NVDA) upcoming annual conference continues to drive AI-related tokens to the upside.

Near Protocol co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin will be on a panel at the conference titled "Transforming AI" and will be hosted by Nvidia's founder and CEO Jensen Huang. His attendance and the upcoming release of Near Tasks, an artificial intelligence (AI) facet of the business, has sparked discussion over whether NEAR will work closely with Nvidia in the future. The company seems to be only crypto-related firm that will be presenting at the main panel.

Near's gains are mirrored across the crypto AI market, with the likes of fetch.ai (FET), the graph (GRT) and singularityNET (AGIX) all posting gains of more than 30% over the past week, according to CoinMarketCap. The CoinDesk 20 index (CD20) has risen by 9.18% in the same period.

The surge has also been buoyed by bitcoin recording a record high of $72,446 on Monday.

Adding to the bullish sentiment, crypto venture capital firm DeFiance Capital's CEO Arthur Cheong wrote on a social media post that "the future is NEAR" on Monday after the token rose by an additional 20% to $7.00, its highest level since May, 2022. On March 5, it was trading at $3.60

The company started as NEAR.AI in 2017, an AI company that had nothing to do with blockchain. The team began building the NEAR protocol in 2018, and the mainnet was rolled out in 2020. Prior to starting Near, Polosukhin was at Google Research, where he worked on developing models and tools that would eventually feed into AI.

Near is a proof-of-stake blockchain that relies on a consensus protocol called Nightshade, which allows Near to operate at about 100,000 transactions per second, and process a block a second. The token currently has a market cap of $7.45 billion, according to CoinDesk data.

Read more: Illia Polosukhin: Building Near's Blockchain, Embedding AI