Bitwise CEO Just Called NEAR a “Moonshot”—Here’s What the $30B Volume Data Actually Proves
(SeaPRwire) – By: Oliver Hawthorne
The crypto market rarely validates a thesis this cleanly. NEAR Protocol just posted a 122% gain in thirty days, trouncing Bitcoin’s 8% and Ethereum’s 11%, yet it sits 75% below its all-time high of $20.44 set back in January 2022. Bitwise CEO Matt Hougan didn’t waste time with the usual cautious hedging when pressed by advisers looking for small-cap exposure with outsized potential. He pointed straight at NEAR and framed it as a rare convergence—an active revenue-generating business plus genuine AI upside. That framing matters because it shifts the narrative away from speculative momentum trading toward something that looks more like fundamental asset rotation.
Let’s cut through the price action and look at what’s actually moving underneath. NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain trading layer, has now processed over $30 billion in cumulative volume since launch. In the most recent month alone, that figure crossed $4 billion—a staggering 896% year-over-year increase. Revenue from Intents over the same period topped $2 million, marking a 512% jump from last year. Bitwise’s own U.S. spot NEAR ETF launched recently, offering regulated investors direct exposure with staking rewards baked in. The mechanism is straightforward enough: users or AI agents declare their desired outcome, and a network of bots called solvers executes trades across multiple blockchains. More AI agents using the system drives more Intents volume, which in turn increases demand for settlement on NEAR. That’s a flywheel, not a hype cycle. The Ondo Finance partnership extends this further by bringing tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onto NEAR through the same Intents infrastructure, opening an entirely new revenue corridor.
What this cycle reveals is a structural shift in how institutional capital evaluates blockchain infrastructure. Arthur Hayes flagged NEAR back in May among his top speculative picks at roughly $3 per token, citing 20x potential alongside Zcash and Hyperliquid. The current price of around $5.19 to $5.38 represents a substantial move from that baseline. Yet the real story isn’t the price—it’s the commercial loop. NEAR has no maximum supply cap, unlike Bitcoin, meaning new tokens continue entering circulation and potentially diluting value. The question every institutional allocator is silently asking is whether NEAR’s price appreciation can outpace its inflation rate. Michaël van de Poppe sees a bullish price structure and a dip-buying opportunity if recent lows get swept. The flywheel is spinning. The revenue is real. Whether the tokenomics can sustain momentum long enough for this thesis to fully play out remains the unfinalized variable.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne is a Principal Correspondent permanently stationed at an international technology review, covering infrastructure-level shifts in digital markets and enterprise blockchain adoption.