Bitwise has launched the first US spot exchange-traded fund tracking NEAR, the native token of the NEAR Protocol layer-1 blockchain. The Bitwise NEAR ETF, trading under the ticker NRR on NYSE Arca, carries a 0.75% management fee and will hold NEAR directly, with the firm intending to stake a significant portion of the fund's tokens.

The launch extends Bitwise's US single-asset lineup, which already includes funds tracking Bitcoin (BITB), Ether (ETHW), Solana (BSOL), XRP (XRP) and Hyperliquid (BHYP). Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan told Cointelegraph that the firm began working on the US product after launching its European NEAR exchange-traded product in June 2025.

Growth in cross-chain volume

The listing coincides with a sharp increase in activity on NEAR Intents, the network's cross-chain transaction protocol. According to Bitwise, cumulative volume on the protocol has risen to more than $32 billion, compared with less than $1 billion a year ago.

NEAR Intents allows users and autonomous agents to specify a desired transaction while third-party solvers compete to execute it across supported blockchains. Hougan said the architecture suits AI-driven workflows.

"The design of Intents, for instance, aligns with the goal-based orientation of LLMs, and shields them from the complexity of bridging and other challenges," Hougan told Cointelegraph.

He added that Bitwise sees AI agents as a growing use case for NEAR and has already observed evidence of agents operating on the network, though most activity today remains human-driven. Cross-chain usability, he argued, remains the protocol's more immediate draw.

"Bridging and cross-chain abstraction has been a challenge for crypto for nearly a decade, and a lot of people have lost both time and money trying to navigate that space," Hougan said.

Institutional attention to agent-driven payments

NEAR shifted its strategy toward artificial intelligence in 2024 and has since concentrated on cross-chain infrastructure and autonomous AI agents. The pivot tracks a broader institutional reassessment of machine-to-machine payments.

Last week, BlackRock said in a research paper that AI agents could increase demand for stablecoins, cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets as machine-to-machine transactions become more common. The asset manager described AI as a potential "structural catalyst" for digital asset adoption, arguing that programmable assets suit high-frequency, low-value transactions operating around the clock.

The thesis carries operational weight for issuers. A staked spot ETF gives holders yield-generating exposure that traditional wrapper structures have historically lacked, a feature Bitwise has rolled out across several of its single-asset products. Whether NRR gathers assets will test institutional appetite for tokens outside the largest-cap cohort, where issuer competition remains concentrated in Bitcoin and Ether products.

Risk controls under scrutiny

The protocol's role in moving assets across chains drew attention this week for a different reason. NEAR Intents said it blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the $387.5 million Bitget hack. Its SHIELD risk system froze roughly $503,000 during execution, while approximately $166,000 in suspected stolen funds passed through the protocol before intervention.

The episode illustrates both the exposure cross-chain routing creates for enforcement teams and the operational tools protocols are deploying to limit it. For an issuer marketing NEAR to US investors through a regulated wrapper, the robustness of those controls is likely to matter as much as raw volume growth.

NEAR's token has rallied about 167% over the past month to trade near $4.94 on Tuesday, according to CoinGecko data, and is up roughly 81% over the past year. Bitwise will now look to convert that momentum into sustained inflows, with additional single-asset crypto ETF filings continuing to work through the SEC's review pipeline.