Bitwise approaches Wall Street as a bet on AI

Bitwise’s NEAR ETF, which trades under the symbol RNRdebuted on NYSE Arca on September 29 as the first NEAR spot ETF in the United States. Notably, it started with staking and generated $35.5 million in net inflows on day one. Not bad.

Indeed, according to Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, this entry has surpassed some of this year’s ETF debuts for assets with larger market capitalization.

So who buys NRR, and how does Bitwise sell NEAR to people who have never opened a wallet?

These threads ran through Horsley’s conversation with David Hoffman and Sal Ternullo, CEO of Nasdaq-listed NEAR treasury company SVRN, in today’s Bankless episode. Let’s break down the big ideas here.

In the episode, Horsley pegged NRR’s first three days at “something like 50 million” admissions. In fact, reported dailies are closer to $58M ($35.5M, then $13.2M, then ~$9M), with daily volume of $15-20M in the first two sessions in particular.

It’s certainly not an anemic start. Furthermore, looking NRR funds page This morning we can see that as of October 1, the trust held approximately 11.5 million PRES worth $53.4 million, of which 98% was already staked.

This treasure represents approximately 0.9% of NEAR’s total supply after just three sessionsand about a fifth of the +55M NEAR held by SVRN.

As for current yield, NRR offers a gross staking rate of 4.90% (90D average) versus 3.28% net, so holders keep approximately 2/3 of the rewards in addition to the 0.75% sponsor fee. This is the convenience premium, meaning there is no validator to run or staking provider to verify.

This launch also does not continue NEAR, 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. Additionally, Bitwise’s validation 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 allows a NEAR account to control addresses on other chains), on which Intents is built primitive. It’s a significant alignment to say the least.

During the conversation, perhaps Horsley’s most important point was how mainstream investors now view crypto.

“We have left the CoinMarketCap era,” as he put it. New allocators, from wealth managers to your uncle, no longer sort tokens by market cap, because most know Bitcoin and little else.

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In this environment, Horsley believes NEAR is an easy sell to this audience, and in large part thanks to AI. His argument is that a co-inventor of modern LLMs (i.e. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the 2017 Google Transformers paper) built a blockchain that allows people to And AI agents move assets across chains, and this is growing rapidly.

Compared to AI platforms with traction, NEAR (nearly ~$6 billion market cap at the time of writing) “might be the cheapest thing you’ve ever seen in your life,” Horsley said.

Ternullo concurred, noting that AI startups have raised pre-money at post-money valuations comparable to NEAR’s roughly $2-3 billion size just four months ago. This is of course a framework rather than a template, although it is a powerful starting point for newcomers.

Zooming out, Horsley argued that crypto And AI fragments into many models, many agents, and multiple L1s and stablecoins. NEAR has positioned itself as the simplifying layer of all of this.

Ternullo linked this dynamic and potential to enterprise AI, where he sees companies increasingly sending sensitive workloads to open source models through private inference (e.g., NEAR AI’s verifiable, telemetry-free setup) and retaining frontier models for the rest.

Horsley went further by making privacy the point of view of Bitcoin’s original idea of sovereignty. your information. This theme came up in my recent article about how NEAR stopped the Bitget hackers without also violating privacy.

The appeal of NRR is that it wraps a network with live revenue And offers a story that hits the mark with AI-curious investors.

Indeed, on this first point, today’s buyers want to capture value, that is to say “income by another name”, in Horsley’s words.

The working version of NEAR is that Intents takes a cut of its swap volume and the net revenue is used to buy back $NEAR. Ternullo emphasized that these tokens are kept instead of being burned.

That said, in the last 30 days ChallengeLlama shows approximately $1.9 million in redemptions versus approximately $13 million in newly issued NEAR at today’s price. Ternullo Proposal of September 30 would reduce maximum issuance from 2.5% to 1.6%, although it would also reduce staking returns from around 5.4% to around 3.5%, and NRR holders already bring in around 2/3 of the gross rewards.

Overall, NEAR’s value capture potential is legitimate but still early, and the emissions debate will shape it as much as Intents’ growth. Ternullo’s proposal is expected to come up for a vote soon, so that’s the next thread to watch out for here.

As for the NRR, Horsley was candid that it is not yet a “raging bull market.” Even so, Ternullo said he wants to see the fund clear $100 million in assets under management and, ultimately, $1 billion. If the AI pitch continues to attract newcomers, this rise seems plausible, so keep this fund on your radar.

*The Bankless team owns crypto assets and advises crypto projects. NEAR is a Bankless sponsor and is included in our disclosures, although this article is not sponsored content. See our full investment disclosures here.