NEAR Cracks the Top 20: Why Bitwise’s Matt Hougan Is Paying Attention

NEAR Protocol’s native token has been on an absolute tear. While the remainder of the crypto market’s momentum cooled, NEAR held on to its rally. It pushed into the prime 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap this week after posting round 125% features in the final 30 days earlier than correcting earlier at present.

According to Bitwise’s Matt Hougan, NEAR stands out as a result of its huge AI imaginative and prescient is backed by a enterprise that’s already producing actual exercise and income.

AI Ambition

NEAR rose 198% in the third quarter, nicely forward of Bitcoin and Ethereum. But for Hougan, the larger story is what the undertaking is constructing and the way that enterprise is creating. NEAR calls itself “the blockchain for AI.” Its long-term objective is to turn out to be the infrastructure for AI brokers that may transact with one another and work together with the wider world.

The fundamental criticism can be clear. NEAR just isn’t really getting used primarily by AI brokers at present. Its customers are nonetheless principally people. But that has not stopped one in all its merchandise from gaining critical traction, Hougan mentioned. NEAR Intents has now processed greater than $30 billion in cumulative quantity. The Bitwise CIO explained that the product is on observe to generate round $45 million in charges this yr. Some of these charges are returned to tokenholders by means of buybacks.

Intents permits customers to maneuver throughout crypto networks with out having to take care of the typical complexity of wallets, bridges and exchanges. A community of market-making bots, often called solvers, handles the transactions behind the scenes. For Hougan, that is vital as a result of Intents is not only a product constructed round a future AI use case. He described it as a “actual enterprise” at present.

“Even if AI brokers by no means turn out to be an enormous deal, or if NEAR doesn’t seize all of that chance, I feel NEAR remains to be positioned to do nicely. In different phrases, after I’m investing in NEAR, I’m shopping for an thrilling blockchain enterprise; the AI moonshot is gravy.”

Bitwise launched a spot NEAR exchange-traded fund, below the ticker NRR, on NYSE Arca final month, with Coinbase Custody as custodian.

$3.8 Million Exploit

NEAR Intents suffered a safety exploit on Thursday that resulted in round $3.8 million in losses. The incident pressured the platform to pause companies and briefly droop deposits and withdrawals throughout a number of blockchains.

According to the official replace, the concern got here from a bug involving its Omni deposit and withdrawal system and the NEAR Intents sensible contract. The vulnerability has since been patched, and the undertaking mentioned affected customers might be totally reimbursed for his or her losses.

The submit NEAR Cracks the Top 20: Why Bitwise’s Matt Hougan Is Paying Attention appeared first on CryptoPotato.