Sturdy cryptocurrency Near Protocol (CRYPTO: NEAR) was doing better than many of its brethren on Monday. As of mid-afternoon, it was up by over 6% in price over the preceding 24 hours. The rise was fueled mainly by an important new deal its developer announced with a major Asian tech company.

Earlier that day, the developer -- Near Foundation -- announced that it had entered a partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Specifically, the developer will be teaming with the company's Alibaba Cloud unit to provide a set of tech functionalities. These include remote procedure calls and multichain data indexing.

Also covered in the Near-Alibaba deal is an agreement to collaborate on developing tools to build decentralized applications (dApps) to be hosted on blockchains like Near Protocol's. These will presumably be used by Alibaba to bolster its considerable e-commerce offerings.

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Source Fool.com