NEAR Through an Institutional Lens: More Than an AI Narrative

In a recent internal memo, Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise Asset Management, placed NEAR Protocol in a distinct category: one of the few crypto assets that combines an ambitious long-term vision with verifiable, real-world business operations. This assessment from a professional fund manager offers a perspective on NEAR's value that extends beyond short-term price fluctuations.

Performance and Market Positioning

The numbers speak for themselves. According to the memo, NEAR posted a 198% price gain in Q3 2024, significantly outpacing Bitcoin (43%) and Ethereum (71%) over the same period. This momentum is backed by a clear market positioning—as a "blockchain built for artificial intelligence."

This narrative is strengthened by its founding team's credentials. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin was a co-author of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which laid the foundation for the Transformer architecture underlying today's large language models. Polosukhin's path from academic research to blockchain entrepreneurship lends unique technical credibility to NEAR's AI vision.

Technical Capability and Business Foundation

The project launched its mainnet in 2020 and has demonstrated impressive scalability in test environments—reportedly capable of handling 1 million transactions per second. However, Hougan's memo emphasizes not just technical potential, but an already established business foundation.

The key product, "Intents," has just surpassed $30 billion in cumulative transaction volume. More importantly, based on its current trajectory, Hougan estimates the product could generate approximately $45 million in fee revenue in 2024. A significant portion of this revenue is not simply held in the protocol treasury but is returned directly to NEAR token holders through a buyback mechanism.

A Dual Value Proposition: Business Floor and Vision Optionality

The core argument of this analysis is that NEAR's value is composed of two parts:

  • A Business Floor: The real revenue and cash flow generated by the Intents product provide a fundamental baseline value for the token.
  • An AI Vision Option: Its grand "AI blockchain" narrative acts like a free, long-term call option. Even if AI agent applications do not become mainstream as anticipated, NEAR still possesses a mature, revenue-generating product.

Hougan describes the AI vision as "gravy"—implying that, in the eyes of professional investors, NEAR's existing business is already substantial enough to support part of its valuation, while the AI narrative provides additional upside potential. This "floor + optionality" structure may be the fundamental reason NEAR is attracting institutional attention in a volatile crypto market.