Bitwise CIO says NEAR’s investment case goes beyond its AI ambitions

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan says NEAR’s investment case rests on its growing blockchain business, with its ambitions to support AI agents offering additional upside.

In his weekly CIO memo, Hougan highlighted NEAR Intents, a product that simplifies transactions across blockchains. Cumulative trading volume has passed $30 billion, and the service is on track to generate roughly $45 million in fees this year, according to the memo. A portion of those fees supports token buybacks.

The assessment follows a strong third quarter for NEAR. Hougan said the token rose 198%, compared with gains of 43% for bitcoin and 71% for Ethereum.

NEAR positions itself as infrastructure for AI agents to transact with each other and the wider world. Its cofounder, Illia Polosukhin, helped write “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind modern large language models.

Hougan described NEAR’s strategy as building useful services today that could support a larger market for autonomous agents in the future. Those services include a blockchain designed for high transaction throughput, tools for moving assets across networks and confidential AI infrastructure.

Intents lets users specify the outcome they want while a network of market makers, known as solvers, handles execution. The system reduces the need to navigate separate wallets, bridges and exchanges.

For now, however, Hougan acknowledged that humans account for most of NEAR’s activity. Intents has gained traction by making crypto easier for ordinary users, rather than through widespread adoption by AI agents.

He argued that this existing demand strengthens NEAR’s investment case even if agentic finance develops slowly or the network captures only part of that market. He also pointed to traction in confidential AI infrastructure, which is designed to protect data during processing.

“When I’m investing in NEAR, I’m buying an exciting blockchain business,” Hougan wrote, describing the AI opportunity as additional upside.

His broader argument is that investors can assess NEAR through products already generating activity and fees, while its role in an economy of AI agents remains a longer term prospect.