Bitwise Debuts Staking NEAR ETF on NYSE Arca, Touting the Token as a Bet on AI Agents

Bitwise Asset Management listed a spot NEAR ETF on NYSE Arca on Tuesday, giving U.S. brokerage investors a way to hold the layer 1 token through a fund that also plans to stake it.

The Bitwise NEAR ETF trades under the ticker NRR and carries a 0.75% management fee, the firm announced on Sept. 29. Bitwise described it as the first spot NEAR exchange-traded product in the U.S.

Bitwise said its institutional staking team plans to stake the fund’s tokens in-house. The release put NEAR’s annualized staking reward rate at 5.3% as of Sept. 25, based on onchain network data, and said rewards will accrue to shareholders through the fund’s net asset value. Rewards are not guaranteed.

Not all of that yield reaches the fund. Under the trust’s prospectus, 33% of the NEAR earned from staking goes to fees split among the staking agents, the custodian and Bitwise, leaving the trust with about 67%.

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Bitwise is selling NRR as exposure to software agents that pay and trade on users’ behalf, with NEAR as the settlement layer.

Matt Hougan, Bitwise’s chief investment officer, said in the release that as agents take over tasks such as booking and payments, the world “is going to need settlement infrastructure that’s fast, trustworthy, and doesn’t depend on a single custodian.”

He pointed to NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain transaction protocol, which Bitwise said has handled more than $32 billion in volume, compared with less than $1 billion a year earlier.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, described the network as “the vertically integrated stack for the AI + blockchain future,” adding: “AI is the front end, blockchain is the back end.”

The firm also cited a market capitalization above $6 billion, a fully unlocked supply, and an inflation rate that was recently cut in half to 2.5%. It said revenue from NEAR’s core products funds token buybacks.

NRR brings to the U.S. a NEAR product Bitwise already runs in Europe, where its staking ETP is approved by German regulator BaFin. It adds to a single-asset U.S. lineup that includes Bitwise funds for bitcoin, ether, SOL, XRP and HYPE.

The firm’s HYPE fund, BHYP, was one of three spot Hyperliquid ETFs that drew about $153 million in net inflows in roughly their first month of trading.

NRR is not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, and the risk disclosures in Bitwise’s release warn that staking exposes the fund to slashing penalties and could slow its ability to meet redemptions.

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