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Bitwise's first US spot NEAR ETF keeps two-thirds of the network's 5% staking reward for holders
Bitwise's NRR, the first US spot NEAR ETF, stakes its tokens and keeps about 67% of a roughly 5% reward rate for shareholders. After the 0.75% fee, that comes to roughly 2.6% a year in extra tokens, just above NEAR's 2.5% inflation.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- NRR began trading on NYSE Arca on Sept. 29, 2026, giving US brokerage accounts direct exposure to the NEAR token.
- Coinbase Custody holds the fund's tokens on Bitwise's behalf.
- Bitwise plans to stake all of the fund's NEAR under normal conditions but may leave some unstaked to handle operations and redemptions.
- Bitwise said the staking rewards are not guaranteed and could carry tax consequences for shareholders.
- Bitwise's 2030 scenarios put NEAR at $1.63 in a bear case, $155.8 in its base case and $562.8 in a bull case.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Holders give up about 2.4 of the headline 5 percentage points each year to staking expenses and the management fee, the price of owning staked NEAR through a brokerage.
- exposure The reward stays inside the trust as extra tokens, so any tax a shareholder owes on it has to be paid from cash held outside the fund.
- contradiction Bitwise's report sets a 2030 base case about 31 times today's price, and Bitwise also says that figure is not its most likely estimate.
Bitwise took the 5% from annualized on-chain data as of Sept. 25 [2][3]. It is the rate the network pays stakers before the fund takes anything out. According to Bankless, roughly 67% of the NEAR that staking generates stays in the fund and the other 33% covers staking-related expenses [9]. Two-thirds of 5% is about 3.35% [1]. Bankless lists the 0.75% management fee as a separate charge [6]. If the fee comes out on top, the NEAR behind each share grows by about 2.6% a year [2]. It grows a little less whenever tokens sit unstaked to meet redemptions [8].
NEAR's network inflation was recently cut to 2.5% [10]. A fund adding about 2.6% more tokens a year keeps pace with that new supply, roughly a tenth of a point ahead [8]. The margin widens in two cases. If the fee sits inside the 33% expense share, holders net closer to 3.35% [1]. If the network reward rate rises above its Sept. 25 reading, the fund's two-thirds rises with it [3][9]. On the terms published so far, I think the staking inside NRR mostly protects holders against dilution and leaves little yield over. The counter-case is that NRR's buyers were never going to run a validator. NEAR Protocol said the fund gives institutions "straightforward access" to the network [17]. For those buyers the alternative is holding NEAR unstaked and taking the full 2.5% dilution, and against that, staying level is a real gain [10].
So the rest of the return has to come from price, and Bitwise's price case runs through AI agents. Its $155.8 base case for 2030 works out to a market value near $200 billion at today's supply of about 1.29 billion tokens, before any new issuance [7]. The case assumes about 2% of an estimated 16.4 billion AI agents run on NEAR by 2030, each doing 1,000 tasks a year at roughly $5 per transaction [14]. Multiply that out and you get 328 million agents running 328 billion transactions, or about $1.64 trillion a year at $5 each [5]. NEAR Intents, the network's transaction protocol, has cleared more than $32 billion in cumulative volume, up from under $1 billion a year earlier [15]. The base case needs yearly activity about 51 times Intents' lifetime total [6]. Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said a coming agentic economy "could unlock an enormous new frontier for the global economy" [16].
What to watch
- NRR's NEAR per share over its first year: net growth near 2.6% or nearer 3.35% will show whether the 0.75% fee sits on top of the 33% expense share.
- Any Bitwise disclosure on how staking rewards kept inside the trust are taxed to shareholders.
- NEAR Intents volume against its $32 billion cumulative mark, the closest public gauge of the agent activity Bitwise's base case requires.