Bitwise’s chief investment officer argues that NEAR Protocol’s investment case no longer depends solely on its longer-term ambition to serve autonomous AI agents.
In an October 7, 2026 memo and related comments, Matt Hougan described the network as an operating blockchain business whose present activity can stand on its own, with the AI vision layered on as additional upside.
Sovereign CEO Sal Ternullo, speaking alongside him on The Rollup podcast, added that the project appears to be moving into a phase where usage more directly supports token value.
Hougan framed NEAR as one of the few smaller crypto assets that combines an expansive future goal with measurable activity today.
The protocol markets itself as infrastructure for AI agents that may eventually transact with one another and with the broader economy.
Its co-founder, Illia Polosukhin, co-authored the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture underlying modern large language models.
After leaving Google, Polosukhin turned to crypto partly to pay a distributed workforce labeling training data, then built NEAR when existing chains proved too slow and costly.
The network launched in 2020 and has continued adding technical features such as dynamic sharding and quantum-resistant signatures.
The more immediate commercial traction, however, has come from human users rather than agents.
NEAR Intents lets people specify an outcome and relies on a network of solvers to handle execution across chains, abstracting away bridges and multiple wallets.
Cumulative volume through the product has passed $30 billion, and Bitwise estimates it is on pace to generate roughly $45 million in fees this year.
A share of those fees is directed into open-market buybacks of the token.
Hougan wrote that an investor can justify a position on the basis of this existing cross-chain business alone, and effectively receive the longer-term AI thesis as incremental optionality.
He also noted early adoption of confidential AI infrastructure that runs models inside encrypted hardware so that data remain hidden even from the network operator.
Price action in the third quarter underscored the shift in attention.
NEAR rose about 198 percent, compared with gains of 43 percent for bitcoin and 71 percent for ether, according to the memo.
Bitwise has also launched a spot NEAR exchange-traded product, ticker NRR, on NYSE Arca, with staking rewards designed to accrue to the fund’s net asset value.
Ternullo described the same trajectory in terms of successive product verticals sharing one token economy.
Intents already produces revenue and supports buybacks.
He said a comparable fee mechanism on the AI side, once usage reaches meaningful scale, could trigger the next revaluation.
On the supply side, the network previously cut annual inflation from 5 percent to 2.5 percent after Intents matured.
A recent governance proposal would reduce issuance further, from 2.5 percent to 1.6 percent over two years, with the stated aim of aligning growing demand with a tighter float relative to the dollar and bitcoin.
Ternullo pointed to Hyperliquid’s emphasis on returning value to holders as an influence on that thinking.
Hougan placed the comments in a wider market that is increasingly differentiating projects by fundamentals rather than lifting assets together.
In his view, the combination of demonstrated product-market fit and a still-developing AI narrative is particularly potent. Both professionals treated agent-driven commerce as early and uncertain; the argument is that NEAR does not need that market to materialize fully in order for the current business to remain relevant.