Bitwise Is Pitching NEAR to Wall Street as an AI Bet
Bitwise's NRR, the first U.S. spot NEAR ETF, drew $35.5M on day one. Hunter Horsley and Sal Ternullo explain the demand and NEAR's AI-first pitch.
Bitwise's NEAR ETF, which trades under the ticker NRR, debuted on NYSE Arca on Sept. 29th as the first U.S. spot NEAR ETF. Notably, it kicked off with staking baked in, and it drew $35.5M in net inflows on day one. Not bad.
Indeed, per Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley, this entrance has outpaced some of this year's ETF debuts for assets with bigger market caps.
So who's buying NRR, and how does Bitwise sell NEAR to folks who've never opened a wallet?
Those threads ran through Horsley's convo with David Hoffman and Sal Ternullo, CEO of the Nasdaq-listed NEAR treasury company SVRN, in today's Bankless episode. Let's break down the big ideas here.
A strong start, years in the making
In the episode, Horsley put NRR's first three days at "something like 50 million" in inflows. In fact, the reported dailies tally closer to $58M ($35.5M, then $13.2M, then ~$9M), with $15M to $20M in daily volume over the first two sessions specifically.
That’s certainly not an anemic start. Additionally, looking at NRR's fund page this morning, we can see that as of Oct. 1st the trust held ~11.5M NEAR worth $53.4M, with 98% of it already staked.
That trove is ~0.9% of NEAR's total supply after just three sessions, and roughly a fifth of the +55M NEAR that SVRN holds.
As for the yield here right now, NRR’s offering a 4.90% gross staking rate (90D average) versus 3.28% net, so holders keep about 2/3rd of rewards on top of a 0.75% sponsor fee. This is the premium for convenience, i.e. no validator to run and no staking provider to vet.
This launch isn’t Bitwise chasing NEAR either, as the crypto asset manager has been ramping up its involvement in the project for some time. The company launched institutional research coverage and a European NEAR staking ETP in 2025. Plus, Bitwise’s validator operation is now among NEAR’s largest.
Ternullo added that Bitwise also helps operate the MPC network behind chain signatures (i.e. the multi-party signing system that lets one NEAR account control addresses on other chains), which is the primitive Intents is built on. That’s significant alignment, to say the least.
Pitching NEAR in crypto’s modern era
During the convo, perhaps Horsley's sharpest point was about how mainstream investors see crypto now.
"We've moved on from the CoinMarketCap era," as he put it. Newer allocators, from wealth managers to your uncle, no longer sort tokens by market cap rankings since most know Bitcoin and not much else.
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In this milieu, Horsley thinks NEAR is an easy sell to this crowd, and largely thanks to AI. His pitch is that a co-inventor of modern LLMs (i.e. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of Google's 2017 transformer paper) built a blockchain that lets people and AI agents move assets across chains, and it's growing fast.
Stacked against AI platforms with traction, NEAR (nearly ~$6B market cap at time of writing) "might be the cheapest thing you've ever seen in your life," Horsley said.
Ternullo was of a similar mind, noting that AI startups have raised pre-product at post-money valuations comparable to NEAR's ~$2B to $3B size just four months ago. That's a frame rather than a model, to be sure, though it's a potent starting point for newcomers.
The bet on fragmentation and privacy
Zooming out, Horsley argued that crypto and AI are fragmenting across many models, many agents, and multiple L1s and stablecoins. NEAR has been positioning itself as the simplifying layer across all of it.
Ternullo tied this dynamic and potential to enterprise AI, where he sees companies increasingly sending sensitive workloads to open-source models in private inference (e.g. NEAR AI's verifiable, no-telemetry setup) and saving frontier models for the rest.
Horsley went a step further, casting privacy as Bitcoin's original sovereignty idea pointed at your information. That theme ran through my recent piece on how NEAR stopped Bitget’s hackers without breaking privacy, too.
Thinking ahead
The appeal of NRR is that it wraps a network with live revenue and offers a story that clicks with AI-curious investors.
Indeed, to that first point, today's buyers want value capture, i.e. "revenue by another name" in Horsley's words.
NEAR’s working version is that Intents takes a cut of its swap volume, and that net revenue is used to buyback $NEAR. Ternullo stressed those tokens are held instead of burned.
That said, over the past 30 days DefiLlama shows ~$1.9M in buybacks against roughly $13M worth of newly issued NEAR at today's price. Ternullo's Sept. 30th proposal would trim max issuance to 1.6% from 2.5%, though that would also ease staking yields from ~5.4% toward ~3.5%, and NRR holders already net roughly 2/3rds of gross rewards.
All told, NEAR's value capture potential is legit but still early, and the issuance debate will shape it as much as Intents' growth will. Ternullo's proposal is expected to go to a vote soon, so that's the next thread to watch here.
As for NRR, Horsley was candid that this isn't a "raging bull market" yet. Even so, Ternullo said he wants to see the fund clear $100M in AUM and, eventually, $1B. If the AI pitch keeps landing with newcomers, that climb looks plausible, so keep this fund on your radar.
*The Bankless team holds crypto assets and advises crypto projects. NEAR is a Bankless sponsor and is included in our disclosures, though this article isn’t sponsored content. See our complete investment disclosures here.
William M. Peaster
William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he covers the onchain frontier with a particular interest in art, games, and other culture apps. He has a background in creative writing and writes fiction in his free time.
