Bitwise began trading its Near ETF on Tuesday, giving U.S. investors a way to bet on the AI-focused Near blockchain from an ordinary brokerage account. The fund trades on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR and charges a 0.75% annual fee, according to Bitwise.
Bitwise calls it the first spot Near fund in the U.S. "Spot" means the fund holds actual Near tokens rather than futures contracts, which are bets on where the price goes next.
An ETF is a fund you buy and sell like a stock. For anyone who never wanted a crypto exchange account or a wallet, that is the whole appeal: the tokens sit inside the fund, and the shares show up next to everything else in your brokerage app.
The timing is hard to miss, especially conisdering Near has been on a roll lately, skyrocketing since May.
It is not the first spike this year. Near jumped 28% in 24 hours in May on privacy, AI and scaling upgrades, then slid back toward $2 over the summer. Near currently trades for just above $5 at a $6.5 billion market capitalization. To put that in perspective, though, the token is still down some 75% from its all-time high above $20.
What Near actually is
Near is a layer-1 blockchain, meaning a base network that other apps are built on, in the same category as Ethereum and Solana. Its main network went live in 2020.
The AI angle traces to co-founder Illia Polosukhin, a co-creator of the Transformer, the architecture behind ChatGPT-style models. Near launched an AI research lab in May 2024, led by Polosukhin and co-founder Alex Skidanov.
Bitwise's pitch leans on AI agents, software that takes actions for you, like paying for things or booking a trip.
“We’re moving toward a world in which AI agents increasingly act on our behalf, coordinate with one another, and participate in the economy,” Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said in a statement. “We believe this shift—to an agentic economy where more and more happens through AI agents—could unlock an enormous new frontier for the global economy. NEAR is building a platform for that future.”
Bitwise adds that Near Intents, a service for swapping assets across different blockchains, has handled more than $32 billion in volume.
Bitwise’s fund also stakes tokens. Staking means locking up tokens to help validate a network's transactions, and in return the network pays rewards, a bit like interest but paid in more tokens. Bitwise says its in-house team will stake the fund's Near to capture average rewards of about 5%, which accrue to shareholders as a rise in the fund's value per share.
Nothing about that is guaranteed. Bitwise's disclosures say rewards can change, and staking carries "slashing" risk, meaning penalties when a validator breaks the network's rules. The fund also holds only one asset, and Bitwise warns investors could lose a significant part or all of their money.
Bitwise filed Delaware paperwork for a Near fund in April 2025, when the token traded at $2.61. Grayscale followed in January 2026, filing to convert its existing Near trust into an ETF while Near sat around $1.54.
The road got smoother in September 2025, when the SEC approved generic listing standards that let exchanges list qualifying crypto funds without a separate approval for each one. Litecoin, Hedera, and Solana funds followed that October, including Bitwise's Solana staking ETF.
Bitwise charges 0.75% a year for NRR, or $75 on every $10,000 invested.
