Bitwise’s spot NEAR ETF opens with $35.5 million as firm leans on AI narrative

A fast start for a niche single-asset ETF

The launch gives NEAR a rare foothold in the U.S. ETF market for spot crypto products beyond the largest tokens. Based on the Oct. 1 holdings, the fund accumulated an amount equal to about one-fifth of the NEAR held by SVRN, underscoring how quickly it gathered assets in its opening sessions.

Bitwise is marketing NRP partly around convenience. The firm says the fund carries a 4.90% gross staking yield based on a 90-day average, with investors receiving about two-thirds of staking rewards after the 0.75% sponsor fee. The structure is designed to spare investors from running a validator or selecting a staking provider directly.

Why Bitwise thinks NEAR can appeal to institutions

Bitwise executives Hunter Horsley and Sal Ternullo tied the early demand to a broader shift in how mainstream investors look at digital assets. In their view, the market is no longer centered only on token rankings and speculative trading, and NEAR can be presented instead as a blockchain aligned with the growth of artificial intelligence.

That pitch leans heavily on NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, who co-authored Google’s transformer paper. Bitwise argues this background helps frame NEAR as infrastructure for AI agents that need to move assets and operate across multiple chains, a narrative the firm believes is more accessible to new investors than traditional crypto messaging.

Ternullo also argued that some AI startups command large valuations before shipping products, making NEAR’s market profile easier for outsiders to understand. In that framing, the token becomes a simpler public-market entry point into an AI-linked blockchain thesis.

Bitwise’s deeper ties to the NEAR ecosystem

Bitwise was not coming to NEAR cold. The firm had already published institutional research on the network, launched a European NEAR staking ETP in 2025, and operates one of the larger validators in the ecosystem.

Ternullo said Bitwise also helps operate the MPC network behind NEAR Intents, the multi-party signing system that allows addresses to be controlled across chains. That involvement gives the asset manager a closer operational relationship with the network than a typical issuer would have, and Bitwise has presented that as a sign of alignment with NEAR’s development path.

The bigger debate is value capture

Alongside the AI story, the article points to an unresolved economic question around NEAR itself. NRP’s revenue model depends on a share of swap volume being used to buy back NEAR, with those repurchased tokens held rather than burned.

Over the last 30 days, those buybacks totaled about $1.9 million, compared with roughly $13 million of newly issued NEAR over the same period. Governance proposals are also considering a reduction in issuance to 1.6% from 2.5%, a change that would lower staking yields to about 3.5% from roughly 5.4%. Since NRP investors already net only around two-thirds of gross staking rewards, any adjustment to issuance could affect the product’s income profile as well as the token’s broader economics.

What comes next

Bitwise executives have said they want NRP to reach much larger asset milestones over time, including a longer-term target of $1 billion. Whether that happens appears likely to depend on two factors highlighted in the report: whether the AI-centered case for NEAR resonates with new buyers, and whether the network can show stronger value capture as Intents and related activity grow.

For now, the confirmed picture is narrower but clear. The ETF has opened with meaningful initial inflows, gathered a measurable share of the circulating asset base, and brought staking-enabled NEAR exposure into a U.S. listed fund format. The next tangible signals will come from further asset growth, the trajectory of Intents activity, and the outcome of the issuance debate inside NEAR governance.