Bitwise's spot NEAR Protocol ETF began trading on NYSE Arca on Tuesday under the ticker NRR, making it the first US exchange-traded fund to hold the token directly. NYSE Arca certified the fund's registration with the SEC on September 28, a day before the listing.
NEAR is trading at $5.04, up 175.24% over 30 days, from below $2 at the start of September. That puts it fourth among the 100 largest crypto assets by monthly performance, according to CoinGecko — a rally that landed in the same window as the ETF approval process.
The staking piece
NRR carries a 0.75% management fee and Bitwise plans to stake the fund's NEAR in-house, passing through the network's average staking reward of about 5%. That structure is the part that separates it from a plain custody product. Shareholders get token exposure plus a yield stream that, in a normal equity ETF, wouldn't exist.
Bitwise already runs a European NEAR product that crossed $100 million in assets this month. Most of that growth, the firm says, came from the token's price rather than fresh inflows.
Grayscale is still waiting
Bitwise isn't alone in wanting a US NEAR ETF. Grayscale filed in January to convert its own NEAR trust, but that fund hasn't listed. For now, NRR is the only vehicle of its kind trading in the US, which gives Bitwise a head start on a name that bigger issuers may eventually want.
The AI thesis, in Bitwise's own numbers
Matt Hougan, Bitwise's chief investment officer, framed NEAR as sitting at the intersection of AI and crypto, serving as settlement infrastructure for AI agents.
The firm's published forecasts run the full range. Its base case puts NEAR at $155.85 by the end of 2030, roughly 31 times today's price. The bear case lands at $1.63, built on centralized AI firms such as OpenAI dominating the field. The max case reaches $562.81.
Those are wide bands, and the bear case is worth reading carefully — it doesn't assume NEAR fails technically, just that the market it's targeting gets captured by someone else.
Where the usage is coming from
NEAR Intents, the protocol's flagship product, has processed more than $32 billion, up from under $1 billion a year ago. That's the kind of number an issuer can point to when the price chart alone looks stretched. It also doesn't say anything about how much of that volume is recurring versus one-off routing.
Meanwhile, the Dogecoin fund is closing
Bitwise is winding down BWOW, its Dogecoin ETF, which stops trading on October 14. The company is consolidating around products it thinks can gather real assets. Two listings, two very different outcomes, in the same month.
The next thing to watch is whether Grayscale's January conversion filing moves. Until it does, NRR is the only US-listed way to hold NEAR in a brokerage account — and the fund's first weeks of flows will show whether the 175% month was enough to bring buyers in behind it.
