TL;DR
- Bitwise launched its NEAR ETF (NRR) on NYSE Arca, the first spot ETP on NEAR in the United States.
- The fund targets staking rewards of ~5% and offers exposure to NEAR Intents, a protocol that processed over $32 billion in volume.
- Global agentic commerce is projected to reach $5 trillion by 2030, with NEAR positioned as settlement infrastructure for AI agents.
Bitwise Asset Management launched the Bitwise NEAR ETF, which trades on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR. The fund, developed by the asset manager with $9 billion in client assets, offers spot exposure to NEAR, the native token of the blockchain protocol oriented toward the economy driven by artificial intelligence.
Bitwise plans to stake the fund’s tokens internally, with the goal of generating rewards averaging approximately 5% per year.
NRR becomes the first NEAR exchange-traded product in the U.S. market and strengthens the asset manager’s presence with this asset outside Europe, where it already operates a BaFin-approved ETP. The new fund joins a lineup of single-asset ETPs that includes products covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and Hyperliquid.
NEAR: Bitwise Bets on AI and Blockchain Combined
Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise, noted that NEAR occupies a particular place in the convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain. “As AI agents begin to transact on our behalf, the world will need settlement infrastructure that is fast, reliable, and not dependent on a single custodian,” he stated.
In that regard, he highlighted NEAR Intents as the ecosystem’s core product, a transaction protocol that processed over $32 billion in volume, compared to less than $1 billion recorded just a year ago.
Agentic Economy
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, described the project as “the vertically integrated stack for the future of AI plus blockchain,” where artificial intelligence operates as the interface and blockchain as the support layer.
For his part, Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, underscored that the shift toward an agentic economy—where AI agents act, coordinate, and participate in markets autonomously—is a frontier of global scale, and that NEAR is building the platform for that scenario.
Among the protocol’s technical characteristics, the Bitwise team highlighted that NEAR has operated with 100% uptime for six years, finalizes transactions in approximately 1.2 seconds, and maintains per-transaction costs below one cent. As for its tokenomics, the asset holds a market capitalization exceeding $6 billion, its full supply is unlocked, and inflation was recently reduced to 2.5%.
