Bitwise Stakes a $155.85 NEAR Bet on NRR

Bitwise set a $155.85 base case for NEAR Protocol by 2030 in a 39-page report, the same week its NRR ETF cleared NYSE Arca.

Chief investment officer Matt Hougan, Europe research head André Dragosch, and analyst Ayush Tripathi wrote the note as a long-shot on AI settlement. The max case is $562.81. The bear case is $1.63. The same house collects a 0.75% fee on the fund that wraps that wager.

The $155.85 Base Case Assumes NEAR Already Won

NEAR Protocol traded at $5.24 on September 27, up 48% over seven days and 247% year to date, after NYSE Arca approved the listing application for the Bitwise NEAR ETF. That print is still a long way from $155.85. It is also a long way from the report’s own 2026 path, which starts at $2.15 and runs to $44.07 in the base case for that year.

The authors do not treat $155.85 as a probability-weighted midpoint. They call NEAR a binary investment in the 39-page report, and they warn that the words “base case” may confuse readers because the figure assumes a successful outcome: the protocol hits its technical road map, and users adopt decentralized agents at commercial scale.

Make no mistake: NEAR is a swing-for-the-fences bet. If it delivers on its vision, it could be a trillion-dollar asset. If it fails, and there is a lot of execution risk in a project this size, it will have little or no value.

Matt Hougan, André Dragosch and Ayush Tripathi, The Investment Case for NEAR

The report itself says most of NEAR’s 47 million monthly active unique addresses still use the chain for wallets, payments, gaming, and consumer tools, not for autonomous agents. It ranked the token 34th by market cap and noted that the price had traded roughly flat over four years before this rally. The AI story is the 2030 model. It is not the 2026 user base.

328 Million Agents and a 50-Times Multiple

The $155.85 print comes from a formula Bitwise labels Protocol Value Accrual. Fees on token swaps, revenue from hosting AI agent tasks, and micropayments tied to model training or inference are stacked, then multiplied by 50. The firm says that multiple sits between early-stage crypto valuations and the roughly 30-times multiple implied by OpenAI’s last private round, which the report puts near $300 billion. Anthropic is cited at $61.5 billion.

BITWISE’S THREE 2030 CASES

The headline number is an undiscounted 2030 success print. Discount that same base case at 15%, and Bitwise’s own table falls to $72.26. The max case leans on Visa, which processed $15.7 trillion of payments in 2024 and carried a market value of about $701 billion in the note. Even the bear case is a model, not a cash dump: 14.25 million agents, $1 average size, plus a thin slice of infra and model revenue, run through the same 50-times multiple on 1.61 billion tokens.

INPUTS BEHIND THE $155.85 PRINT

• Global agents: 16.4 billion projected by 2030, with NEAR taking 2%, or 328 million.
• Activity: 1,000 transactions per agent per year at a $5 average value.
• Take rate: a 0.3% protocol fee on that volume, plus swap and model lines.
• Multiple: 50 times that revenue stack, divided by 1.61 billion tokens.

Against the $5.24 spot price on September 27, $155.85 is roughly 30 times higher and $562.81 is more than 100 times higher. The bear case sits 69% below that same print. Hold today’s circulating supply of about 1.3 billion tokens constant, and $155.85 still implies a market value above $200 billion before extra coins from staking. NEAR Intents, the cross-chain execution layer in the thesis, has already routed about $30 billion of volume, which is the live activity Bitwise uses as a proof of concept rather than as the 328 million agent load.

What NRR Keeps After the Staking Cut

The Bitwise NEAR ETF, ticker NRR, is built to hold the token and to stake some or all of it. The September 24 prospectus sets a 0.75% annual sponsor fee on the trust’s NEAR, paid in token, monthly. Staking expenses take 33% of the extra NEAR that staking produces, split among staking agents, Coinbase Custody Trust Company, and the sponsor. The other 67% stays in the trust.

Bitwise On-chain Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent, is slated as staking agent for some or all of that book. The sponsor fee and a piece of the 33% can therefore land in the same corporate group. Creations and redemptions run in 10,000-share baskets, in token or in cash. Cash creations force the trust to buy NEAR, and staked coins then sit behind the network’s unbonding clock.

THE NRR FILING CLOCK

1. April 24, 2025: The trust is formed as a Delaware statutory trust.
2. July 28, 2026: Bitwise Asset Management buys 8 seed shares at $25, a $200 book.
3. September 16, 2026: A preliminary S-1 goes in under registration 333-286995.
4. September 24, 2026: The 424B3 prospectus is dated, registration is effective, and NYSE Arca approves the listing application via Form 8-A.
5. October 19, 2026: The 25-day window in which dealers may still have to deliver the prospectus runs to this date.

An affiliate is expected to buy a $500,000 seed basket, 20,000 shares at $25, and to use the cash to purchase NEAR at or before listing. Bitwise pointed at September 29 as the target window. The filings still do not fix a first trade. Until shares actually change hands, NRR is an approved wrapper, not a flow number.

Europe’s Staking ETP Already Holds $132 Million

The U.S. product is late to a trade Bitwise already runs in Europe. The Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP, listed on Xetra, showed $132 million in European ETP assets on September 28, with a 0.85% TER, a 90% staking target, and a net staking reward near 3%. That book is physical, in cold storage, and benchmarked to the CF NEAR Staked Return index.

The American share class is cheaper on the headline fee and heavier on the staking split. It also opens brokerage accounts that cannot touch a German ETP. If creations follow the Solana pattern Bitwise already lived through, inflows can keep arriving while the token price does something else. The European AUM is the only hard demand figure the house can point to before NRR prints a holding report.

Why Hayes Says Agents Will Not Pay in NEAR

Arthur Hayes, the Maelstrom chief investment officer building Flop Network, has argued that AI agents will want money that converts straight into compute, not dollars, Bitcoin, or a general-purpose layer-1 token. His line is that there is no currency with a direct link to floating-point work, and that agents will demand the unit they can spend on inference.

AI agents will end up using a currency that can be exchanged directly for computing resources, rather than dollars or Bitcoin.

Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom CIO and Flop Labs CEO

NEAR is trying to occupy the other chair. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin, one of the authors of the transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need,” has pushed the chain as a coordination layer for user-owned agents, not as an LLM vendor. The network now lets users stake NEAR to pay for AI usage, turning locked tokens into compute credits for confidential inference and always-on agents across dozens of models. That is a lockup story as much as a fee story. It still leaves Hayes’s objection in place: if the scarce resource is compute, a settlement token that is not redeemable for flops can lose the meter even if it wins the rail.

Futures Traders Added 100 Million NEAR in Two Weeks

Leverage got to the ETF window first. CoinGlass showed NEAR futures open interest at $1.56 billion early on September 27, the highest reading on a series that starts in late 2023. Market cap that day was $6.85 billion, so outstanding derivatives were about 23% of the network’s value, and larger than a day’s $1.31 billion of spot volume.

THE LEVERAGE SITTING ON $5.24

• Open interest: $1.56 billion, up from about $500 million in mid-September when NEAR was near $2.35.
• Fresh size: about 100 million NEAR of extra contract exposure in under two weeks, once the dollar rise is stripped out.
• Spot context: $5.24 on September 27, after a $5.44 high that failed inside a nine-day rising channel.
• Supply math: about 1.3 billion tokens circulating now, versus 1.61 billion in Bitwise’s 2030 table.

A $562.81 token on 1.61 billion coins is a $906.64 billion network in Bitwise’s max case, which is why that print reads as a banner more than as a base rate. Analyst Michaël van de Poppe put his own base at $150 and up and his bull at $550 and up, then wrote, “I don’t think we’re bullish enough on crypto for the coming years.” Those brackets sit on Bitwise’s, so they add heat, not a second model. The quieter tell is the futures book: a listing that still has $500,000 of seed capital is arriving into the heaviest NEAR leverage in three years of CoinGlass data.

Grayscale’s OTC Trust Still Costs 2.50%

U.S. brokerage access to NEAR did not start with NRR. Grayscale Near Trust already quotes on OTC as GSNR, with a 2.50% total expense ratio, $2,948,891 in assets, a $6.69 NAV, and a $13.44 market price as of September 28. That is about double net asset value on 441,100 shares. Grayscale has also filed to convert the trust into a spot ETF under the same ticker, with staking still barred unless extra conditions are met.

THREE WAYS TO HOLD NEAR IN A WRAPPER

NRR is the cheap, staked, exchange-listed version of a trade that already exists in two clumsier forms. It is also the product whose research desk just published a 2030 success case 30 times above the September 27 price. The trust can start trading around September 29 if the last operational steps land. Daily holdings will then show how much NEAR the house actually lifts, and whether 328 million agents were ever the point, or whether a 0.75% wrapper on a levered rally was.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Bitwise’s NEAR research note and the NRR ETF filings, and it is for information only. It is not investment, trading, tax, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell NEAR, NRR, the Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP, GSNR, or any other crypto product. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser and, where relevant, a tax professional who understands digital-asset ETFs and staking before acting. Figures, listings, fees, and fund statuses are those published by Bitwise, the SEC filings, Grayscale, and the market sources named above as of the dates given, and they can change with flows, protocol rules, and regulation.