NEAR Cracks the Top 20: Why Bitwise’s Matt Hougan Is Paying Attention

NEAR Protocol’s native token has been on an absolute tear. While the rest of the crypto market’s momentum cooled, NEAR held on to its rally. It pushed into the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap this week after posting around 125% gains in the last 30 days before correcting earlier today. According to Bitwise’s Matt Hougan, NEAR stands out because its big AI vision is backed by a business that is already generating real activity and revenue. NEAR rose 198% in the third quarter, well ahead of Bitcoin and Ethereum. But for Hougan, the bigger story is what the project is building and how that business is developing. NEAR calls itself “the blockchain for AI.” Its long-term goal is to become the infrastructure for AI agents that can transact with each other and interact with the wider world. The main criticism is also clear. NEAR is not actually being used mainly by AI agents today. Its users are still mostly humans. But that has not stopped one of its products from gaining serious traction, Hougan said. NEAR Intents has now processed more than $30 billion in cumulative volume. The Bitwise CIO explained that the product is on track to generate around $45 million in fees this year. Some of those fees are returned to tokenholders through buybacks. Intents allows users to move across crypto networks without having to deal with the usual complexity of wallets, bridges and exchanges. A network of market-making bots, known as solvers, handles the transactions behind the scenes. For Hougan, this is important because Intents is no longer just a product built around a future AI use case. He described it as a “real business” today. “Even if AI agents never become a big deal, or if NEAR doesn’t capture all of that opportunity, I think NEAR is still positioned to do well. In other words, when I’m investing in NEAR, I’m buying an exciting blockchain business; the AI moonshot is gravy.” Bitwise launched a spot NEAR exchange-traded fund, under the ticker NRR, on NYSE Arca last month, with Coinbase Custody as custodian. NEAR Intents suffered a security exploit on Thursday that resulted in around $3.8 million in losses. The incident forced the platform to pause services and temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals across several blockchains. According to the official update, the issue came from a bug involving its Omni deposit and withdrawal system and the NEAR Intents smart contract. T