Tulip King
Head of Strategy at CounterpartyTV, Crypto Investor
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 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
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
NEAR feels like an older, inflationary tech coin that has had its time in the sun, even if the case makes some sense on paper. A post the author replies to describes selling all NEAR and rotating into Zcash and Hyperliquid because conviction in it never grew. x.com
Hyperliquid's valuation looks stretched against what serious markets pay for exchanges, and perpetual futures have been, and always will be, a niche product with no real moat. x.com
NEAR Intents activity and fees keep accelerating alongside NEAR's price. September intent volume reached a new monthly high of $4.07B, while fees surpassed $7.7M and reached $55M since inception; NEAR rose 156% over the same period. x.com
Nano does not meet the criteria for investment yet: it needs a Turing-complete virtual machine and a DeFi ecosystem whose use burns supply before it becomes interesting. Its Sybil resistance does involve some work per transaction, but feeless transfers alone, as a post the author replies to touts, are not enough. x.com
NEAR's intents volume keeps compounding, reaching $23.5 billion all time, and the token buyback turns those fees into direct buying pressure, a deflationary flywheel. x.com
NEAR's buyback flywheel is turning: NEAR Intents had its biggest revenue week ever last week, and $500,000 of NEAR was bought back. x.com
NEAR should be valued as a well-rounded layer-1 rather than for one use case, since its intents do not generate meaningful revenue and their network effects are relatively weak. Judged that way it is strong, with good governance, technology and economics, and it is time for the good L1s to rise. x.com
