The Bull Case for $NEAR: One of The Biggest Plays for This Cycle

You have probably been incrypto long enough to remember when the bull case for almost every L1 was basically the same.

HEY! We have this faster and more scalable chain... boring.

Then the cycle ended and we discovered that having a technically good blockchain doesn’t automatically make the token valuable.

And oh man that’s exactly why I think what is happening with NEAR right now is much more interesting than the old “NEAR is an underrated L1” argument.

The project has spent the last years changing what it wants to become.

Adapt or die they say, right?

NEAR Intents is now routing tens of billions of dollars across chains. The protocol has started capturing revenue from that activity.

1.3M NEAR has flowed to the buyback wallet according to NEAR’s current revenue dashboard (we love buybacks remember that).

Inflation has become an explicit target for reduction and even now AI agents are becoming part of the actual product stack.

Then we have the biggest news, Bitwise is preparing to put NEAR inside a US-listed ETF that can hold the asset directly and stake it.

This is the first time I think all the pieces of the NEAR thesis actually connect and it’s why $NEAR is becoming one of the main projects I’m watching this cycle.

You should too, so keep reading, you won´t regret it.

NEAR finally found something bigger than being an L1

NEAR spent the previous cycle competing with Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and every other smart-contract platform for developers and TVL.

I never found that particularly exciting as an investment thesis.

There are already enough blockchains, Im tired of L1s.

What NEAR is building now starts from a different problem: crypto has become ridiculously fragmented.

You can have USDT on Tron, USDC on Base, ETH on Ethereum, SOL on Solana and BTC sitting somewhere completely separate.

Moving between all of them still means dealing with bridges, different wallets, gas tokens, approvals, routes and liquidity.

NEAR Intents tries to hide that entire mess.

Instead of manually deciding how a transaction should happen, you tell the system what you want at the end.

“I have USDT on Tron. Give me USDC on Ethereum.”

Solvers compete to execute it.

The user gets the result.

NEAR Intents currently advertises $30B+ in all-time volume across 35 chains. (NEAR Intents⁠)

So NEAR can potentially capture economic activity even when the user isn’t trading a NEAR-native asset.

And this time the activity for $NEAR is bullish

This is probably the biggest reason my view on NEAR has changed.

Crypto has an incredible talent for building successful protocols with tokens that capture absolutely nothing from their success.

NEAR is trying to close that gap.

The Intents fee system now captures part of the economic activity flowing through the product, and NEAR’s revenue dashboard traces 1,303,607 NEAR to its buyback multisig.

The same dashboard currently shows $51.13M in total fees generated across the tracked system and $13.90M in cumulative protocol burn and gross revenue. (Dashboard de Ingresos NEAR⁠)

That gives us an actual economic loop to follow:

Intents gets used → fees are generated → NEAR captures revenue → revenue can purchase NEAR

NEAR can process $100B in Intents and the investment thesis still sucks if none of that value reaches the token.

Now we can literally track whether it does.

That creates a metric I want to follow for years:

NEAR purchased/removed/locked versus NEAR entering circulation.

If revenue keeps growing while issuance falls, the token starts becoming structurally more interesting.

Bitwise shows up

Bitwise has registered the Bitwise NEAR ETF, ticker NRR, for listing on NYSE Arca.

The SEC registration became effective on September 24, and Bitwise’s Form 8-A states that its application to list the shares on NYSE Arca had been approved. (SEC⁠)

This creates a traditional US market wrapper around the asset.

The fund is designed to hold actual NEAR as its primary asset and has a secondary objective of generating additional NEAR through staking.

Think about the flow if NRR starts attracting meaningful capital.

Money enters the ETF.

The trust needs exposure to spot NEAR.

Part of those holdings can be delegated to staking.

Those tokens sit inside institutional custody rather than immediately circulating through crypto exchanges.

At $5.24, $100M of demand represents 19.1M NEAR.

That’s 1.46% of the current ~1.307B supply.

(Obviously I’m not saying the ETF will magically receive $100M)

But now there is a completely new buyer that simply did not exist before.

The ETF arrives at a very convenient moment for NEAR tokenomics

The timing here is almost perfect.

NEAR’s supply is already largely unlocked.

That removes one of my biggest problems with newer L1 trades: buying something at a $5B market cap while another $8B of tokens waits to unlock on your head.

NEAR has 1.307B tokens circulating against roughly the same total supply in the market snapshot you provided.

So the future supply conversation is increasingly about emissions, staking rewards, grants and treasury activity rather than giant VC cliffs.

Now combine that with: lower maximum inflation,Intents buybacks, more NEAR being staked, and potentially an ETF accumulating and staking additional supply.

That’s a much cleaner setup than NEAR had during the previous cycle.

$30B through Intents

CT still underestimates this.

The endgame for Intents isn’t convincing existing NEAR users to swap one NEP-141 token for another.

The addressable market is liquidity itself.

NEAR describes Intents as a universal transaction layer connecting chains, assets and agents, with solvers competing to execute cross-chain requests. Its current product page reports $30B of all-time volume across 35 chains. (NEAR⁠)

Stablecoins are especially interesting here.

Moving large amounts between USDT, USDC and other dollars across chains is still surprisingly annoying.

NEAR has been building execution specifically around this market, including large stablecoin swaps and solver-based routing.

This is the type of activity I want from a protocol.

NEAR could accidentally become an AI trade

Illia Polosukhin being one of the authors of Attention Is All You Need always made NEAR an easy project to attach an AI narrative to.

NEAR’s 2026 roadmap explicitly combines cross-chain financial infrastructure with autonomous AI agents. NEAR AI focuses on private inference and agent execution, while IronClaw is designed to isolate credentials and tools inside secure environments. (NEAR Roadmap⁠).

The same infrastructure NEAR is building for humans moving between fragmented blockchains starts looking extremely useful for machines moving money autonomously.

Actual economic activity performed by agents.

If that market becomes real, NEAR already has the transaction layer waiting underneath it.

The ecosystem finally has things I actually want to watch

I’m also watching the projects sitting closest to these flows.

Rhea Finance is probably the obvious one. It combines DEX functionality, lending and multichain execution around the Intents ecosystem. If NEAR succeeds at bringing liquidity from outside its own chain, Rhea is positioned close to where some of that activity can become DeFi.

HOT Protocol is interesting from the wallet and Chain Signatures side. Distribution becomes incredibly valuable if Intents turns cross-chain execution into something users stop thinking about.

PublicAI, Crynux, Intellex, ConsumerFi and PAI3 are the more speculative AI/data layer. I’m treating these as optionality rather than evidence that NEAR already owns the agent economy.

PingPay is one I particularly want to follow because payments are probably a much better test of Intents than another incentivized DeFi farm.

Then you still have Aurora, Ref, Burrow, Meteor, Intear, Nightly, VEAX and the rest of the older ecosystem.

I don’t need every one of these projects to win.

I need a few applications to prove that Intents can turn external liquidity into recurring economic activity.

What would make me much more bullish

There are five numbers I’m going to watch obsessively.

NRR AUM.

This tells us whether traditional access produces actual demand.

NEAR held and staked by the ETF.

This tells us how much of that demand is becoming relatively sticky supply.

Intents revenue.

Volume looks great on screenshots. Revenue tells me whether people are paying for the infrastructure.

NEAR buybacks.

This is where product success reaches my bag.

Net issuance.

Because buying 2M NEAR means a lot more when 1M enters circulation than when 20M enters circulation.

Put those together and the entire investment thesis becomes measurable.

My $NEAR thesis

I’ve followed NEAR for years, actually since 2022 when I almost top blast the top at the end of my first cycle.

This is probably the first version of the project where I can draw a line from product usage all the way to the token without inventing half the diagram myself.

And Bitwise is opening another route for traditional capital to acquire the same asset and potentially stake it.

Then you have the wild card:

AI agents may eventually become some of the largest users of exactly the cross-chain execution infrastructure NEAR has spent years building.

But if the opposite happen, ETF assets grow, Intents keeps compounding, revenue scales and buybacks start meaningfully eating into issuance

I think the market will eventually stop valuing NEAR as another old-cycle L1.

It starts looking more like infrastructure sitting between chains, capital and autonomous agents.

And that’s why $NEAR is one of the plays I’m watching closest this cycle.

The old NEAR wanted people to use its blockchain.

This NEAR wants to make money every time people, apps and eventually AI agents move value across everyone else’s.

That is a much more interesting business, now we are talking.

If you enjoyed this read, remember to follow me!

StarPlatinum.