Andy
Co-Founder of The Rollup & The Rollup Ventures
NEAR's private-inference demand should grow with Venice's chat app, making the pair the best long on AI-crypto convergence. Venice uses private inference to power its breakout chat app, which is uncensorable and verifiably private, and NEAR has the best privacy-based AI product on the market. As Venice's user base grows, so does demand for NEAR's private inference. x.com
NEAR is an AI-native blockchain and a pioneer of chain abstraction, and its run from $1.90 to $4.27 is not done yet. x.com
Privacy and AI tokens are converging into core infrastructure, because autonomous agents handling wallets, payments and identity need private execution. Zcash is among the strongest pure privacy plays, NEAR targets AI and confidential coordination, Chainlink feeds agents trusted data, and Bittensor sits where AI compute meets crypto. Phala and Nillion, tied to confidential compute, could move violently either way. The whole sector is worth $59 billion against Nvidia's $5.1 trillion. x.com x.com … Show more
NEAR's $2.4 billion market cap already prices it as a major AI and apps layer, so the success of NEAR Intents does not justify the valuation. Intents is a strong bridging product and handled over $200 million of volume in about a day, per @andyyy, but it earns only about $1.5 million in annualized revenue, and valuing NEAR as a bridge is not very bullish. This may be a midcurve take. x.com
NEAR could benefit from a fragmented crypto market because Intents earns fees on crosschain liquidity, with some revenue buying NEAR. Intents processed $34.2B across 37 chains; its buyback wallet holds about 1.4M NEAR. Confidential TVL reached $150.3M, up 345% in 90 days, and its 30-day volume share rose to 29%. Private execution could attract larger participants; fee-paying demand from AI agents remains unproven. These on-chain metrics support more appropriate repricing. x.com x.com
Actual use of NEAR Intents, including private swaps, is a bigger positive sign for NEAR than ETF inflows. BSC News reports $5.22 million into Bitwise's NEAR ETF in the latest week; that is still small money. x.com
NEAR is not private, not secure, centralized and not permissionless, as the $3.8 million exploit of NEAR Intents shows. Its popularity is driven by undisclosed paid marketing pushing people to buy a dinosaur coin and a trash chain. x.com x.com
Nillion and Eigen look like the next crypto-AI tokens to run after VVV and NEAR, and both are still super early. Nillion suffered a market-maker mishap, but the team resolved its issues and kept building rather than giving up on its product. Eigen, like NEAR, has pivoted and is expanding beyond restaking infrastructure. It took months for the market to notice VVV and NEAR, which are only now ripping. x.com x.com
Crypto capital is concentrating in AI-related infrastructure tokens such as NEAR Protocol and Fetch.ai rather than leaving evenly. In recent market moves, meme coins crashed while AI tokens led the market-cap surge, with NEAR up 69%, Akash 51% and Fetch 39%. The message is to pivot to AI or get left behind. x.com
NEAR can never be money, so any monetary or privacy premium ascribed to the token will flow to permissionless neutral protocols like Zcash and, to a lesser degree, Monero. NEAR's freezing of funds from the Bitget hack was the right business decision, but it shows that programmability creates governance surface area that is antithetical to money. The NEAR chain made about $150k in 30 days, Intents $1.7M and perps $61k, an insane multiple for something that isn't money. x.com x.com x.com
NEAR Protocol's launch of private perpetuals trading powered by Hyperliquid is building serious momentum for both NEAR and HYPE. Traders can now open positions without publicly exposing every move, and NEAR rose more than 80% in the seven days after the launch. x.com
