Bitwise CIO says NEAR shows "healthiest" dispersion signal in a decade

Hougan says wide price dispersion signals a fundamentals-driven market

Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise, opens by pointing to roughly 130% dispersion between the best and worst performing of the top 20 crypto assets over the last 30 days. He calls this "the healthiest signal digital assets has produced in a decade" because it means specific, idiosyncratic events are driving prices rather than a single cyclical wave lifting everything together.

"The assets that are winning at the top of that list, I can go by piece by piece and say why they're up there... It's not all assets going up. It's very specific, idiosyncratic driven results." — Matt Hougan

Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN, agrees, noting that after ten years of "rising tide lifts all ships" cycles driven first by technology fundamentals, then user adoption, the market is finally pricing revenue fundamentals. Both say they expect momentum-driven, delusional bull phases to eventually return, but see the current dispersion as a reflexively positive dynamic, with projects improving tokenomics out of what Hougan describes as competitive "jealousy" after seeing value accrual rewarded elsewhere, citing Hyperliquid as an example.

NEAR's repricing tied to Near Intents revenue and a coming AI fee switch

Ternullo says SVRN held the view that NEAR was "fundamentally mispriced" based on revenue growth from Near Intents, publishing a bottom-up investment case in Q1 that complemented a market-driven thesis Bitwise had released roughly six months earlier. He describes the recent 30-45 day move as a repricing event "that was always on the horizon" and says the broader AI stack and its value accrual is "just the beginning" of the next chapter.

Hougan frames NEAR as an "easy investment" today because of demonstrated product-market fit in Intents, with the long-term AI vision acting as "a call option that comes along free for the ride." He says pitching traditional investors works by showing an undeniable revenue or TVL chart for Intents, then layering on the AI narrative built around Ilia's background and NEAR's privacy focus, rather than trying to explain the full technical picture in a short conversation.

Ternullo adds that NEAR's private inference product, used behind Venice, offers a verifiable guarantee that no operator can see prompts or outputs, which he says drove token consumption sharply higher once it went live on OpenRouter. He expects NEAR's AI vertical to "follow a similar track to Intents: prove product market fit, scale, and then ultimately drive value accrual to the token," calling the eventual fee switch on the AI side the trigger for "the next repricing event."

NEAR's tokenomics shift: lower inflation, buybacks, and a shelved sovereign wealth fund idea

Ternullo walks through NEAR's tokenomics timeline: emissions were cut from 5% to 2.5% inflation roughly a year earlier, and the network has since begun programmatic buybacks on the Intents side once it reached sufficient scale. He says Ilia proposed a "sovereign wealth fund" concept for using buyback proceeds, which the ecosystem has since shelved over concerns about discretionary management, but which fed into an inflation reduction proposal published "just last week" in the governance forum to cut inflation from 2.5% to 1.6% over a two-year curve, which he compares to a recently approved change in the Solana ecosystem.

Hougan declines to endorse one buyback model over another, saying it is too early to assume a single correct approach, but says the important thing is having "value accrual to token holders" as a long-term north star.

Bitwise's NRR ETF and why Hougan sees a new bull cycle starting in Q4

Hougan describes NRR, Bitwise's spot NEAR ETP listed on NYSE Arca, as carrying a 75 basis point management fee with in-house staking targeting roughly 5% rewards that accrue to shareholders through NAV. He says Bitwise is selective about which assets get ETPs, requiring a strong fundamental thesis and community, and had already run a European NEAR ETP before working to bring the US product to market. He acknowledges the timing came a few weeks after NEAR's biggest recent move but argues Bitwise is "many years early" relative to broader investor awareness.

Zooming out, Hougan says he believes the market bottomed in June and that a confluence of factors — improved SEC and CFTC regulation, real revenue, tokenized real-world assets, and AI developments — supports a new bull cycle. He expects the next leg of demand to come from wealth advisers at large wirehouses allocating in Q4, following typical crypto cycles where retail capital moves first and institutional capital follows once regulatory "all clear" signals appear.

24/7 markets, virtual cards, and agentic infrastructure

Discussing the shift toward round-the-clock markets, Hougan says the move is broadly positive — more global, efficient, and liquid — but carries an "echo risk" of liquidity cascades during periods of leverage and low liquidity, similar to episodes already seen in crypto. Ternullo adds that traditional institutions are not resourced on a follow-the-sun model to handle 24/7 markets, and that building risk and compliance comfort with incident response on, for example, "Saturday night at 12:00 p.m." will take a long adoption curve.

On a card processor's shift toward virtual cards rather than stablecoins, Ternullo says this reflects the processor's own incentive to protect payment flow margins but does not think it changes the long-term stablecoin addressable market, comparing it to earlier pushes toward permissioned ledgers. Hougan says he is not worried about stablecoin growth, citing a San Francisco Fed note on stablecoins filling a gap left by reduced foreign purchases of US treasuries, and says regulatory capture by incumbents will only affect the pace, not the outcome.