- Bitwise’s NEAR ETF began trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR on 29 September, which the firm calls the first US spot fund for the token.
- The fund’s prospectus says it intends to stake 100% of its NEAR and does not plan to keep an unstaked reserve for redemptions at the outset.
- CoinGecko put NEAR’s market value at about US$6.5 billion (AU$9.3 billion) on Wednesday, against US$3.1 billion (AU$4.4 billion) in the prospectus’s 15 June figure.
Bitwise listed the first US spot NEAR Protocol (NEAR) fund on Tuesday, 29 September, pitching the token as infrastructure for AI agents that transact for their users.
NRR, the fund’s ticker on NYSE Arca, packages the token’s price with its staking rewards. Bitwise said it intends to stake the fund’s NEAR in-house through its institutional staking team. It estimates the network’s average annual staking yield at roughly 5%.
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said: “We’re moving toward a world in which AI agents increasingly act on our behalf, coordinate with one another, and participate in the economy.”
The release cites a McKinsey projection that global agentic commerce could reach US$5 trillion (AU$7.15 trillion) by 2030.
“NEAR is the vertically integrated stack for the AI + blockchain future: AI is the front end, blockchain is the back end”, NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin said.
Bitwise’s release names NEAR Intents, the network’s protocol for settling cross-chain transactions through smart contracts, as NEAR’s flagship product. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes made a separate case in May, pitching NEAR Intents as a privacy rail for Zcash.
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Issuance Halved Last October
NEAR Protocol halved its maximum annual inflation rate to 2.5% in a mainnet upgrade on 30 October, 2025, the network posted at the time. The prospectus says 90% of that new supply goes to validators and 10% to a treasury the NEAR Foundation manages.
The same document says 70% of each transaction fee on NEAR is burned, so supply grows more slowly than that rate. It also notes that slashing, the penalty that destroys part of a misbehaving validator’s stake, is not yet enabled on NEAR’s mainnet.
The prospectus put NEAR’s market value at US$3.1 billion (AU$4.4 billion) on 15 June, ranking it the 27th-largest digital asset. CoinGecko data showed about US$6.5 billion (AU$9.3 billion) on Wednesday, with the token near US$4.95 (AU$7.08).
No Unstaked Reserve at Launch
The fund intends to stake 100% of its NEAR, according to the prospectus. It plans no liquidity reserve of unstaked tokens for redemptions as of the filing date.
Bitwise warns that staking could impair the fund’s ability to meet redemption orders on time. The fund’s 0.75% annual fee is paid in NEAR, so each share represents less of the token over time.
NRR is not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. The release says it therefore lacks the protections that apply to mutual funds and registered ETFs.
Bitwise’s European NEAR staking product, approved by Germany’s BaFin, already trades. In the US, NRR joins Bitwise’s single-asset funds on Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Hyperliquid and Solana.
The Solana staking ETF opened with US$56 million (AU$80.1 million) in first-day trading in October 2025.
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