Bitwise Asset Management listed the first U.S. spot NEAR exchange-traded product on NYSE Arca on September 29, ticker NRR, at a 0.75 percent fee — and the pitch is not another bitcoin clone. It is in-house staking plus a claim that AI agents will need a settlement layer.
The fund holds NEAR tokens and is designed so Bitwise's institutional staking desk can stake the lot, aiming for the network's roughly 5 percent reward rate as of September 25. Rewards are meant to accrue in net asset value, not as a cash coupon. NRR is not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the same legal wrapper used for many earlier single-asset crypto products. Bitwise managed about $9 billion as of June 30. The listing extends a European staking ETP into the United States and sits beside the firm's Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and Hyperliquid funds.
Chief investment officer Matt Hougan said NEAR sits at the intersection of AI and crypto, and that NEAR Intents — a cross-chain transaction protocol — is the practical version of agents booking and paying without a single custodian. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin called the chain a vertically integrated stack for an agent economy. The protocol's materials say Intents have processed more than $32 billion in volume, up from under $1 billion a year earlier, with finality around 1.2 seconds. Inflation was recently halved to 2.5 percent. McKinsey has projected agentic commerce could reach $5 trillion by 2030, a figure Bitwise put on the press release.
The second-order product is yield with a story attached. After a year of Bitcoin, ether, Solana, and XRP listings, a NEAR fund has to sell something the others do not. Staking inside the wrapper is that something. The AI-agent narrative is the marketing. Investors who buy NRR are underwriting both: a 5 percent network reward that can be slashed, and a thesis that software agents will clear value on a chain most U.S. brokerage customers could not name last month.
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