Key Insights:
- NEAR crypto jumped 198% in Q3 as Intents surpassed $30B in cumulative volume.
- Bitwise sees NEAR’s existing business as the foundation for its larger AI-agent ambition.
- Intents could generate about $45M in fees this year, with some revenue returned through buybacks.
The NEAR crypto thesis is no longer one about a blockchain preparing for artificial intelligence. In an October 7 CIO memo, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan pointed to a 198% Q3 gain for NEAR and more than $30 billion in cumulative Intents volume and roughly $45 million in fees projected to occur this year.
His point is that AI is the larger opportunity, but the existing business is not dependent on its arrival.
NEAR Crypto Has a Business Before the AI Bet
Bitwise’s memo puts NEAR in an unusual position. The network is pitching itself as “the blockchain for AI,” but the most tangible evidence of its traction is coming from ordinary users.
NEAR Intents allows users to move between blockchains without having to deal with the usual mix of wallets, bridges, and exchanges.
According to Bitwise, cumulative volume has now crossed $30 billion. The product is also on track to generate about $45 million in fees this year, with a portion returned to tokenholders in buybacks.
That provides the NEAR crypto thesis with a revenue layer that other AI-themed assets do not yet have. Hougan argued that investors do not have to wait for a future agent economy to evaluate the network’s usefulness today.
Why NEAR Crypto Outpaced Bitcoin and Ethereum?
The scale of the Q3 move is informative for the NEAR price. Bitwise reported that Bitcoin gained 43% during the quarter and that Ethereum rose 71%. NEAR climbed 198%, making it one of the more pronounced large-cap crypto moves of the period.
That does not prove that AI triggered the rally. Bitwise’s memo did not make that claim. Instead, it pointed to a combination of existing network activity and a longer-term AI vision.
The difference is that a token’s performance can draw attention to a thesis, whereas the figures behind Intents offer a different way of measuring adoption. For NEAR crypto, that is the most important part of the report.
NEAR Aspires to Be More Than a Blockchain
The NEAR crypto pitch begins with co-founder Illia Polosukhin, who co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.”
The paper introduced the transformer architecture that became foundational to modern large language models. Bitwise argues that NEAR has been working backward from the needs of an AI-agent economy.
High transaction capacity would be needed for large-scale machine activity, and cross-chain execution would be required as agents interact with assets across multiple networks.
Privacy would matter if those systems are handling money or sensitive information. The NEAR crypto network has products built towards those requirements, including Intents and private AI infrastructure.
Bitwise explained that Intents allows users, including AI systems, to execute cross-chain transactions via a network of “solvers,” while its private AI infrastructure is designed to keep sensitive data hidden even from NEAR itself.
But the memo is careful about the timing. Agentic finance is still in its infancy, according to Hougan, which makes the AI crypto opportunity a longer-term thesis.
AI May Be the Extra, Not the Foundation
The most unusual part of the NEAR crypto thesis is that the AI play does not need to carry the entire case today. Hougan describes NEAR as an “exciting blockchain business” with the AI opportunity as additional upside.
He also argues that even if AI agents are not going to be a major market, NEAR can still perform well via its existing businesses. That is materially different from buying an AI crypto asset based almost exclusively on its future usage.
The NEAR crypto thesis has two layers. One is measurable now: Intents has crossed $30 billion in cumulative volume and is projected to generate roughly $45 million in fees this year. The other is still in development: infrastructure for an economy where AI agents transact on behalf of users.
For the NEAR crypto price, the next question is not simply whether AI becomes bigger. It is whether the network can continue to transform existing activity into volume, fees, and buybacks while building its infrastructure for agents.
Bitwise’s October 7 memo makes the case that both can co-exist. NEAR has a business, and AI is the larger bet on what that business can become tomorrow.
