NEAR Donchian Channel Trend Following on 1H

A trend-following strategy on NEARUSDT perpetual futures using 1-hour bars and Donchian Channels. Donchian Channels track the highest high and lowest low over a lookback period — the simplest possible breakout indicator with no lag or smoothing artifacts. When price breaks above the upper channel, enter long; when it breaks below the lower channel, enter short. Exit via an ATR-based trailing stop that locks in profits during trends while giving room for normal pullbacks. NEAR Protocol is a liquid L1 altcoin (~$2-5B market cap) that exhibits strong trending behavior driven by narrative cycles, ecosystem developments, and AI-narrative association. The 1H timeframe provides sufficient trade frequency (estimated 150-300 trades/year) while filtering out noise present in lower timeframes. This strategy explicitly avoids mean reversion (which failed on altcoins — see BNB failure) and avoids overly complex multi-indicator setups that produce frozen signals in verification. The Donchian Channel calculation is trivially simple: max(highs[-N:]) and min(lows[-N:]), ensuring calculate_signal() will always produce varying values as price evolves.