A new product giving direct U.S. access to NEAR

The first U.S. move in the spot NEAR ETF market has come from crypto asset manager Bitwise. The fund, which began trading on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR, gives investors direct exposure to the NEAR token. The fund’s annual management fee was set at 0.75%, while the company said it plans to stake a significant portion of the tokens in its portfolio.

Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said the company had been working on this U.S. product after launching a NEAR exchange-traded product in Europe in June 2025. NRR has been added to the company’s lineup of single-asset crypto products in the U.S. tracking Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP and Hyperliquid.

A rally in the token and growth in network volume supported the launch

What do the numbers show?

The launch came immediately after a strong rise in the price of NEAR. According to CoinGecko data, the token was trading at around $4.94 on Tuesday, up about 167% over the past month and about 81% over the past year.

  • Transaction volume on NEAR Intents rose to more than $32 billion, according to Bitwise, from under $1 billion a year ago.
  • The new fund aims to give investors closer exposure to token price moves by holding NEAR directly.

NEAR is known as a layer-1 blockchain built for decentralized applications. The network shifted its strategy toward artificial intelligence in 2024 and later began focusing more on cross-chain infrastructure and autonomous AI agents.

Institutional interest, AI and security take center stage

According to Hougan, the use cases for AI agents on NEAR are expanding and early signs of that are already visible on the network. Still, most of the current activity is said to be driven by human users.

On the broader market side, major financial institutions are examining whether autonomous software will boost demand for blockchain-based payment infrastructure. BlackRock said in a research note published last week that AI agents could increase demand for stablecoins, crypto assets and tokenized assets as machine-to-machine transactions become more common.

NEAR Intents allows users and AI agents to define the transaction they want, while third-party solvers execute it across supported blockchains. The protocol also said this week that it blocked more than $50 million in transfer attempts linked to Bitget’s $387.5 million hack; its SHIELD system froze about $503,000 during execution and roughly $166,000 in suspicious funds passed through the protocol.