Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan says the investment case for NEAR rests primarily on its growing blockchain business, with the network's ambitions to support artificial intelligence agents offering additional upside.

In his weekly CIO memo, Hougan highlighted NEAR Intents, a product that simplifies transactions across blockchains. Cumulative trading volume through the service has surpassed $30 billion, and it is on track to generate roughly $45 million in fees this year, according to the memo. A portion of those fees supports token buybacks, a mechanism that ties the token's economics to real product usage rather than to narrative alone.

The assessment follows a strong third quarter for NEAR. Hougan noted that the token gained 198% over the period, compared with rises of 43% for bitcoin and 71% for Ethereum.

NEAR positions itself as infrastructure that allows AI agents to transact with one another and with the wider world. Its cofounder, Illia Polosukhin, was among the authors of "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture underpinning modern large language models.

Hougan characterized NEAR's strategy as building useful services today that could later support a larger market for autonomous agents. Those services include a blockchain designed for high transaction throughput, tools for moving assets across networks, and confidential AI infrastructure.

How NEAR Intents Works

NEAR Intents lets users specify the outcome they want, while a network of market makers known as solvers handles execution. The design removes the need to navigate separate wallets, bridges, and exchanges.

Hougan acknowledged, however, that humans currently account for most of NEAR's activity. Intents has gained traction by making crypto easier for ordinary users rather than through widespread adoption by AI agents. He argued that this existing demand strengthens the investment case even if agentic finance develops slowly or the network captures only part of that market. He also pointed to momentum in confidential AI infrastructure, which is designed to protect data while it is being processed. The distance between today's human-driven usage and the agentic vision is the crux of his framing: one can be measured today, the other has yet to materialize.

"When I'm investing in NEAR, I'm buying an exciting blockchain business," Hougan wrote, describing the AI opportunity as additional upside.

His broader argument is that investors can evaluate NEAR through products already generating real activity and fees, while its role in an economy of AI agents remains a longer-term prospect. Signals to watch include whether Intents volume and fee generation continue to climb, and whether AI agents begin to account for a meaningful share of network activity — developments that would show how much of the AI upside is taking hold.