--- id: "g-AB1uLLeTc" title: "Matt Hougan & Sal Ternullo: NEAR Is One Of The Best Positioned Assets In Crypto" channel: "The Rollup" host: ["Robbie"] guests: ["Matt Hougan","Sal Ternullo"] date: "2026-10-06" updated: "2026-10-15" duration: "35:09" duration_seconds: 2109 source_type: "youtube" youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-AB1uLLeTc" canonical: "https://pod-exp.pages.dev/en/g-AB1uLLeTc/" transcript_jsonl: "https://pod-exp.pages.dev/en/g-AB1uLLeTc/transcript.jsonl" language: "en" translation: false timestamp_precision: "block" topics: ["Crypto and Web3","Investing","AI agents","Financial infrastructure"] series: ["NEAR","Crypto investing"] --- # Matt Hougan & Sal Ternullo: NEAR Is One Of The Best Positioned Assets In Crypto > English transcript prepared from captions; audio accuracy has not been verified. `>>` marks a speaker change where captions do not name the speaker. Timestamps are block-level (start of the timestamped block), not per sentence, unless a paragraph carries its own [hh:mm:ss]. > Prepared from English captions; manual or automatic track origin is unknown. Title, summary and chapter labels are editorial additions. Audio accuracy has not been verified. **Summary:** Bitwise’s Matt Hougan and Sovereign’s Sal Ternullo discuss the launch of a US spot NEAR exchange-traded product and the investment case they see in NEAR. They connect reported growth in NEAR Intents with the project’s longer-term AI thesis around privacy, verifiability, and open models, while describing how they present current product traction and future optionality to investors. The conversation turns to market dispersion, token-holder value accrual, buybacks, and a proposed reduction in inflation. The guests also consider agentic payments, virtual cards, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and the operational demands of 24/7 markets, including low-liquidity cascades and institutional staffing. The close compares ETF exposure with Sovereign’s operating-company approach. ## [0:00] NEAR’s Recent Repricing and the NRR Launch · YouTube If you look at something like the last 30 days, there's about 130% dispersion between the best and worst performing of the top 20 crypto assets. \>\> My name's Robbie and you're watching The Roll Up and today I'm asking you to please subscribe, comment, like, and support our channel. We interview some of the best and brightest minds in digital assets, digital finance, and tokenization. We are doing this for you, so please sit back, relax, enjoy the show, and thank you so much for all your support. What's up, guys? Welcome back to The Roll Up. I'm Robbie and we've got a big show for you guys here today. Sal and Matt Hougan from Bitwise and Sovereign. And these guys, congratulations to these guys cuz they just launched the NRR on New York Stock Exchange, the latest NEAR ETF. Um and we're going to hear about it. Uh Sal has been running Sovereign for a while on the Treasury company side of things. Uh big, influential partner in the NEAR ecosystem. And Bitwise is now getting in with their NEAR ETF NRR on the New York Stock Exchange Arca. Um and so this is the first US spot NEAR ETP, uh 75 basis point management fee, in-house sta- uh staking targeting roughly 5% rewards that accrue to shareholders through NAV. So we're going to get into it. Tons happening in the NEAR ecosystem, obviously. You guys have heard us talking about NEAR. It's on a big, big run and these guys are at uh are are on the train with us. Matt, Sal, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you guys again. How are you guys feeling with uh the most recent uh wave of adoption here on on NEAR? Good to see you guys again. \>\> My question. \>\> It's great to be here. Why don't you take it away, Sal? I'll follow up. \>\> Yeah, I mean it's been it's been a good ride. We have held the view and have talked about this a while that we felt the asset was fundamentally mispriced based on the traction that we were seeing and revenue growth on intense. Um we put out a piece, I think in Q1 that really kind of covered the bottom-up case for investment, which was complimentary to a more target market-driven approach that Bitwise had released maybe six months prior. And I think what we saw over the past, you know, 30 days, 45 days was really just this repricing event that was always on the horizon and really just finally caught up. So, obviously good news for the whole ecosystem. Candidly, just the beginning. I think the next chapter is all about the AI stack and value accrual around that. But very exciting to see over the past, you know, 30, 45 days. \>\> Yeah, and I I just toss in to completely agree with that. I think for a long time people were thinking about NEAR as this moonshot on the AI side and they were having difficulty pricing that. I think the reality of what we're seeing now is the the undeniable growth of the economics of intent have made it like an easy investment from that perspective. And then you get the long-term vision almost as a a call option that comes along free for the ride. So, the market is repricing this dramatic growth in intent, this obvious product market fit, the real revenue meta. And they're still also excited about that long-term vision that we were talking about beforehand. So, I think you pair those together and you get one of the best-performing assets in crypto. And from our view, that's that's probably well-positioned to continue. \>\> Very, very cool. Um, yeah, we've been tracking this as well. NEAR big uh partner on the AI side for us. Uh, but generally, I mean, the intent side, AI side, it feels like all of these are starting to converge and we're seeing this confluence of factors that is leading NEAR uh to aggressively reprice. Um, you know, Sal, you've been in the game for a while. This most recent announcement from Bitwise NRR um on the New York Stock Exchange ARCA, you know, Matt, I take it you guys have been kind of eyeing this and strategically looking for how to get into this ecosystem. Why now? Why did you go ahead and launch uh NRR now? And uh ultimately, tell us a little bit more about the product. ## [3:53] Why Bitwise Chose NEAR for a US ETP · YouTube \>\> Yeah, you know, we're pretty selective in terms of the crypto assets that we launch ETPs on. So, it needs to be an asset that has a strong fundamental thesis, that has a strong community behind it, and we think that it has staying power. It takes time, resources, and effort to bring a product to market, and so we're not going to do it if we're not convinced that the asset has a long-term place in the world and a community that will drive it forward. We've been eyeing NEAR for a while. In fact, we've had a European ETP for a while, and we've been working here in the US to bring it to market because we think it's part of the portfolio that any traditional financial investor investing in crypto and blockchain should want to have. Uh the precise timing, I wish we had done it like 3 weeks earlier for the benefit of our investors. You can't be perfect, but it was an alignment of sort of the the the moment in the market, and then some important under the hood legal and regulatory work to get it fully approved and fully greenlit on all the platforms. And uh while we maybe were a few weeks late, I think we're also uh many years early. So, I think it it fits that fits that window. \>\> Abs- absolutely. And I think if we're we're sort of looking at maybe what is driving, you know, this aggressive repricing is, you know, the revenue meta underneath of NEAR intense is is, you know, bringing some of the more higher quality on-chain businesses to the surface. But then there's there's also, you know, the AI side of this. Um the agentic economy is heating up. Facebook launched Muse. OpenAI launched dots. Grok bot is accelerating. And so, it really feels like these LLMs are now crossing the agentic chasm. And that's where the frontier is. And I can't help but also notice the timing that, you know, the the really like the 10 to 15 days that NEAR really accelerated in terms of price happen to be exactly the same time frame as the frontier model companies talking about pacing the frontier and slowing down AI. That seems like it can't be a coincidence. Maybe you guys can just talk about how you view the current AI complex in the public and private markets off chain with the frontier model companies and how NEAR might be a response to that. ## [6:15] NEAR AI, Privacy, and Product-Market Fit · YouTube \>\> Yeah, maybe I can take take the first stab at that and then then Mac can follow on. I mean, the thesis around NEAR AI has been really delivering the same attributes of privacy and verifiability, confidentiality that are kind of core to the most recent narrative arc starting last September on on the digital asset side and imbuing those principles inside of the infrastructure layer to support open models. And so, I think Muse was a great example of this, but when you actually peel back the onion and look at the under the underpinnings from a technology point of view, NEAR's private inference product is the only solution in the market today where a third-party client can actually verify that no operator can see or have any telemetry data on the prompts or the outputs associated with the interactions with open models. It's the strongest privacy guarantee sitting behind Venice today. And once we saw this go live on Open Router, the consumption on a token basis just went through the roof. And so, there's some metrics and data that's coming out on the side, but I think you're starting to see the early innings of clear product market fit at the right moment in time. And that is very much in contrast to kind of the frontier labs approach here and some of the concerns that we've seen around AI sovereignty, you know, starting back in the end of Q1 and continuing through Q2. So, you know, we're super excited. I think it's going to follow a similar track to intense, prove product market fit, scale, and then ultimately drive value accrual to the token. \>\> Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You know, the frontier labs have been doing two things for us. They've been demonstrating how important AI is to our future. I think Muse is a good example to that while asking us to turn over more and more of our information to them at the same time that they've been sort of lighting their reputation and trust on fire in the public in the public venue. And Near is perfectly fit for that moment exactly for what Sal said. I think the exciting thing about it is is that the quantum of people who understand that is really, really small. Right? One of one of the reasons I said we're a few weeks late, but maybe a few years early is the few weeks late is the the sort of crypto native AI focused community recognizing that Near fits into this puzzle piece that the world needs. But the vast majority of people are just starting to get to that position, right? That's the few years early piece. So, a part of the reason I'm so excited is there's product market fit and there's also narrative market fit. And I think when you combine those two, you can get really significant outsized move. We've seen that in a few other crypto assets recently that have sort of met product market fit with narrative market fit and have had very large positions. I think Near is well positioned for that as well. \>\> And ## [8:57] Explaining NEAR’s Traction and Optionality · YouTube Matt, when you're describing this to the investor community, there's sort of a lot of moving parts. And I And I think that, you know, is the product market fit and narrative market fit converging like you're describing, but for a long time it's also felt like, you know, the this is sort of like chasing narratives and these are sort of disjointed. And if you look at Near now, obviously we've got the AI side of things and Sal described how, you know, token usage is going through the roof as people discover the privacy element to this. You've got the Near Intent side, that's generating revenue. You've also got Perp and you've got, you know, a lot of chain abstraction and chain signatures and a lot of a lot of pieces here. How How do you communicate this to the investor economy or or the the investor community? And And what are the parts where they're really picking up and seeing the vision? \>\> Yeah. What I What I love to do, it's hard, is part of the answer. But for sure, it's hard. And Sal probably does it better than anyone. But what I found effective in talking to traditional investors, financial advisors about NEAR, is selling them on this sort of existing product market fit and then optionality. So again, that's part of the reason why Intense is so important because you can put up a revenue chart of Intense or a TVL chart of the amount of use there. And it's undeniable that it's solving this important need in the market, which is we have these different chains that are hard to interact with. It makes it very simple. You can invest in NEAR exclusively on that basis and justify the valuation. And then on top of it, you can paint part of this long-term picture of where it's going from an AI perspective. If I'm being perfectly frank, it's very hard to do that in a 2-minute conversation. You often start with sort of uh sort of intellectual proof points. You talk about Illia's background. You talk about their role in privacy. You give sort of a 30,000-ft view. But that's enough because people sort of view it as I'm getting this asset for its current product market fit and revenue on Intense and cross-chain capabilities. And then I get this long-term vision driven by this uh sort of OG in the AI genius world uh for free on top of that. And that makes it extraordinarily attractive. If you can get a solid investment with moonshot potential, um that's sort of a a perfect mix for traditional investors. So that's the approach we've been taking, and it's one that I think has been resonating with people. \>\> Yeah. And Sal, maybe you can just help tie some of these pieces together. We've had Illia on kind of describing the overall vision that, you know, he saw since he was 12 years old, right? That we would have lots of bots, and they would you know have to communicate with one another. Um maybe you can help piece together how intense perps and the AI side of things ultimately creates, you know, a healthy and thriving agentic economy. \>\> Yeah, I mean I I think all of this is coming together to to kind of complement what Matt was saying. In some ways the easiest pitch for NEAR has been go use near.com, right? This is a consumer-facing application that embodies all of these features and very soon will be leveraging private inference in some of the components of Iron Claw to demonstrate what agentic interactions look like through a super super clean UX. Um Matt Henderson has done an awesome job on the product design side. I think the UX there is just fantastic. Um and so if you ever hit this friction point in the investor kind of pitch process, it's like either show them the app live and let's experience it together or go use the app. And I think once you start to see a good UX around agentic interactions through that experience, it will change how, you know, people really look at this. Um but ultimately from from from what gets me excited around it is not just kind of the UX and showing people, it's the fact that we're soon to have multiple product verticals with product market fit scaling aggressively designed around a single token economy. And so I think once we hit the fee switch, hit a scale that makes sense and hit the fee switch on the AI side of this, we probably see the next repricing event in NEAR. \>\> Mhm. Well, okay. Well, obviously we're all very very excited to see that happen. I mean ## [13:05] Market Timing and the Case for a New Cycle · YouTube Matt, you know, when you launched this like you said, it was kind of on the heels of this, you know, 150% move. Does that make it easier or harder to sell to investors? Are they like do they have FOMO and they want to get in or is it like hey, we already missed the boat? \>\> Mostly it makes it easier because you can pan out to a long-term chart and show them that we're very early in this. You can do relative market valuation metrics. People love to say that they love to buy the dip, but no one actually does. They actually prefer to chase the rip. So, I wish I could tell you that like, you know, it would have been better at June 30th at the bottom depths of despair. Um but that's just it's just practically not true, right? If the If the sort of concept we're making is traditional investors looking down the market cap stack to find the most interesting projects that could leap into the top five and leap into market caps that are uh tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Uh it's hard to put it something that's just been going down and say that's it. It's actually easier that it's gone up even though it's gone up uh you know, 100 whatever percent. It's If If Sal and I are right about where Near is going, uh that's very much just a down payment, and I think that resonates with investors. So, uh it's okay that it's gone up a little. \>\> Um and you know, Matt, just kind of zooming out from, you know, this particular case, but where do you think we are in the market right now? We've kind of had some aggressive repricing both in Near most most prominently, but also across the board more generally. And it kind of feels like, you know, we're still early in a lot of ways. What do you think is going to drive the next aggressive repricing? Do you think it's now momentum is on our side, bear market is over, bull market has started? Where do you think we are generally in the current landscape? \>\> Yeah, I think look, I do think we bottomed in June, and I think we're in a new bull market cycle. I think we have a confluence of very positive events that are lining up to push that forward. We have dramatically improved regulation. We're seeing that from the SEC and the CFTC that's driving institutional investment. We have revenue for the first time in crypto's history that's showing real. We have tokenization bringing real-world assets on chain. We have what's going on on the AI side. We have all that coming together to sort of push the industry forward. So I do think we're in a long-term bull market cycle. In terms of, you know, what I expect to drive us forward over the next handful of months, crypto has this sort of echo wave of interest. Um which is the first interest is never institutional capital. It's always sort of retail capital responding. Institutional capital follows on because they move slower. Um I feel very confident that we're going to have significant inflows on the ETF side across the spectrum in Q4 as traditional investors start to allocate into this space. A lot of them wanted to earlier in the year, but the market was relentlessly down. Now they've gotten the all-clear, and so I think it's actually that. It's wealth advisors at big wirehouses coming in that are give the next push of capital upwards. And um you know, based on our conversations, they're extraordinarily well-positioned to do that. \>\> Yeah. I on the show recently I've said that the market feels a little bit more rational these days where, you know, for a while it was like, "Hey, we were getting a lot of good news and the market wasn't reacting up." And then we were getting a lot of bad news and it wasn't reacting down. It was just very apathetic. Now it feels like there you can make a difference in your project again. You can make a difference to the industry if you, you know, have a positive announcement, you know, you will see an uptick and and vice versa, you know, to the downside. And so now it feels like some of these things are starting to matter a lot more. ## [16:51] Fundamentals, Market Dispersion, and Tokenomics · YouTube \>\> It's such a huge point. If you look at something like the last 30 days, there's about 130% dispersion between the best and worst performing of the top 20 crypto assets. That is a beautiful thing if you believe in a fundamentally driven market, right? The assets that are winning at the top of that list, I can go by piece by piece and say why they're up there. It's not some random asset that pumped for no reason that I can't explain. It's not all assets going up. It's very specific, idiosyncratic driven results, and that is much healthier than a momentum driven cyclical market. Um I do think that's the market we're in. I said we're in a bull market, but I think it's going to be a differentiated bull market where there are winners and losers where some zombie chains sort of fall out of the pack and we never hear from them again. I do think that's the market that we're in toward what you said. The market's rewarding these idiosyncratic good events, punishing idiosyncratic bad events, and that's extraordinarily healthy uh long term. \>\> Yeah. \>\> Can only Robbie so welcome. You've lived this industry for 10 years. Like how many times has it been the rising tide lifts all ships with zero discretion and discernment between fundamentally driven projects? I mean, I remember back in 2024 hoping and praying that we would have some contemplation of fundamentals. Same thing in 21. I would pitch this to my investors on the venture side where we were looking at at that point technology fundamentals, then user adoption fundamentals, then now revenue fundamentals, and finally after 10 years of that rising tide lifting all ships, we actually have this kind of dispersion effect that Matt's describing. Um so for folks that look at this from that fundamental lens, it's like a breath of fresh air and finally the market is more rational. \>\> Yeah. And I'm curious if you guys think this is going to happen too, but it it it also feels extremely early in that regard because now we are driven by fundamentals. That is leading to this wide dispersion like you mentioned, Matt. But I can't help but think the market will progress to the point where we get delusionally bullish again, and you end up with this rising tide that lifts all boats. But because we're here now, it feels early and we're still yet to get there. \>\> I think that's probably right. We haven't killed uh wildly bullish uh momentum. There'll certainly be that that will certainly happen. But the other thing that's really nice about this idiosyncratic driver thing, it's actually sort of uh reflexively good for crypto because other projects see projects being rewarded for doing the right thing for token holders and improve their own positioning. I think some of the improvement of tokenomics that we've seen across part of the spectrum has been driven by jealousy, right? They saw people saw what happened on hyperliquid. They're like, "Oh, we got to deliver value back to token holders." And suddenly more and more people do. It's only in markets where that's rewarded that you get that virtuous circle. And I think actually we have an element of that flywheel going in crypto right now. ## [19:44] Inflation, Buybacks, and Token-Holder Value · YouTube \>\> Yeah. And Saul, you mentioned the fee switch that could get turned on or will get turned on once NEAR reaches sufficient scale, especially in its AI product. NEAR already has a semblance of a fee switch on the NEAR intent side, and that's driving some programmatic buybacks. Maybe you can just talk us through the way that you see this progressing on NEAR in particular. There's been a wide range of opinions. Some say that buybacks are irrelevant, right? Some others say that this is, you know, an imperative. The reasonable middle ground feels like once you reach that product market fit and sufficient scale is when you start getting into buybacks. How do you see this progressing on the NEAR side in particular going from NEAR intent to ultimately the wide intrinsic holistic buyback strategy and fee switch that could drive a, you know, potentially disinflationary or deflationary NEAR economy? \>\> Yeah, it's a timely timely question. Um and we look at this This This journey really started a year ago, right? October 28th last year, we halved emissions on the network from 5% inflation to 2.5% inflation. We took the chart on the intent side to prove product market fit and scale, and then consciously made the decision once we achieved a stickiness and some semblance of a moat from market saturation on the integration side to say, "It's now time to start monetizing and delivering value back to token holders through buybacks. Um hyperliquid to Matt's point was absolutely an inspiration for the market. The outperformance with such a strong value accrual mechanic made a ton of sense. And I think what you've seen more recently over the past maybe 90 days is some really good intellectual debate around should the buybacks drive burns, right? Would a series A series B startup, you know, Sep Kamvar was talking about this recently, would a series A or series B startup be buying back stock and retiring it? You know, the NEAR point of view, and this is largely attributable to Illia and his vision, was, you know, we should be delivering value to token holders. We should be buying back the token, but maybe it's not the right answer to burn those assets. And so, he put forward a proposal maybe a month ago now to think about this idea of a sovereign wealth fund concept, which ultimately we've shelved as an ecosystem for some of the reasons that we covered around discretionary management, etc. But it really gave us kind of credence to the point of view of if we can build effectively a balance sheet for the protocol, you can start to think about new tokenomics design in the future. And so, you know, just last week we published an inflation reduction proposal in the the governance forum to take the inflation rate from 2.5% to 1.6% over a 2-year curve, quite similar to what you saw recently approved in the Solana ecosystem. Um so, when we think about tokenomics, it's not just the demand economy, it's also the supply side. And really the objective here is to reach an equilibrium that maximizes the value of NEAR on a relative valuation basis to dollars, Bitcoin, and other assets in the ecosystem. And I think it's part of that holistic approach towards looking at these different factors that is contributing to NEAR outperforming today. \>\> Absolutely. And And Matt, anything to add on the buybacks in a landscape as it exists today? And any any, you know, advice or recommendations as near and the rest of these token economies kind of think through these decisions. \>\> I think they're doing a good job thinking it through. I I think we're we're too early in the process to assume that there's any one correct way. Uh everything that Sal said resonated with me. I think the important thing is to have that North Star of value accrual to token holders driving those discussions, long-term value accrual, and uh the market will reward uh who the market rewards. But, as long as you're driving towards that North Star, I think there are many ways to get there. ## [23:32] Virtual Cards, Stablecoins, and Agentic Payments · YouTube \>\> Yeah. Um I I I had something that come to came to mind cuz I it feels relevant to kind of the near addressable market. As I I mentioned I was in Sibos and I was kind of talking to some of these banks and the way that they're kind of thinking through stable coins and tokenized deposits and this kind of thing and there was a large card processor that I was talking to about this and um I asked them what their fastest growing business segment was and they said virtual cards. So, very relevant to the agentic economy, but not necessarily bullish stable coins. And, you know, this company is also participating in a consortium to launch stable coins. So, it feels like they're kind of playing both sides of the field, but you know, they are really really seeing a lot of growth in this virtual card business. Mention you know, Muse got launched by Facebook. I used Muse and it generated a virtual card for me to book a hotel to go stay in Sibos. And so, how do you guys think this is going to play out? I just, you know, it feels like that total addressable market is still up for grabs as we kind of think through the implications of, you know, stable coins and and agentic payments. How do you see this progressing and and do you think virtual cards is a potential and or tokenized deposits? Do you think those are potential threats to the to the the large stable coin addressable market that you know, we we feel like it's driving a lot of the adoption here. \>\> I think I think personally this is a case of show me the incentive and I'll tell you the outcome scenario, which is obviously if I am a large card network that monetizes payment flow through point of sale and different types of interactions, I would highly prefer driving growth towards a virtual cards business and then to the extent feasible leverage stable coins under the hood to drive higher margins. So that doesn't surprise me as a comment coming from the the type of business that you were speaking to. I candidly don't think on a longer term horizon that has any impact on the realization of the TAM that we're talking about with stable coins. This feels to me like friction that is similar in some ways towards the aggressive push towards permission ledger systems in 2016 to 18 when we were thinking, oh, we can't disrupt market structure, let's make our back office more efficient and solve post-trade settlement and reconciliations, etc. So I do think virtual cards have a place in these systems, but I don't think it ultimately changes where we go and I think behind the scenes obviously that's you know, a beneficial thing to push for a a payment card processor. \>\> Yeah, it feels like a stepping stone to a more fully fledged out on chain economy for agents and very similar to the way that tokenized deposits ultimately feel like we're getting towards stable coins, virtual cards towards stable coins. It's just a matter of like you said the friction to ultimately onboard. Now what do you what do you see? Do you think that you know, that this is going to slow us down at all? \>\> I mean look, the the existing system is trying to you know, do as much regulatory capture and push back as it can and that's its job and it's going to be modestly successful at that in the US in particular. I do think it's probably too early to say definitively how these things will play out, but I'm not worried about stable coins addressable market. I actually think a lot of it is outside the US anyway and we may be overly focused here in the US on that specific thing. Just the other day, the San Francisco Fed put out a chart about stablecoins filling the gap left by China not buying our treasuries. That made me want to buy everything in the stablecoin ecosystem because if the US government sees it as the only way it's forestalling that, you can bet that it's going to end up winning to a large degree no matter what the banks and payment processors think. So, ultimately, I think we get to the end game, which is stablecoins, but how fast we get there will depend on how much regulatory capture we do see. \>\> Yeah, absolutely. And I we've talked at length about this macroeconomic shift, you know, twisting the duration out of the bond market, pushing more issuance into the short end of the curve, and you know, relying on stablecoin issuers to buy those bills. Um And and like you mentioned, because sovereigns aren't quite, you know, you know, filling filling that gap. The The other thing that I heard at Sibos, and I wanted to I wanted to run by you guys, was a lot of the impotence for these banks to even take blockchains and the on-chain world and pay any attention to it at all has been because of this push towards 24/7 markets. Um they mentioned that, you know, they really wouldn't even, you know, instead of stablecoins, they're focusing on tokenized deposits. Obviously, we know, you know, where the incentive is, and that's why they're, you know, focusing on there. But, you know, they are talking about moving things on chain, and the only way to do that for a 24/7 market, the only way to have a 24/7 market is to run a lot of this in a tokenized world on chain. And I'm just curious how you see this progressing. ## [28:33] 24/7 Markets, Liquidity Risk, and Operations · YouTube This feels like a very fundamental shift that all of financial institutions are taking seriously. What do you think changes in a 24/7 economy when these things are operating at a full, you know, 24/7 market hours, we have, you know, no closed doors, tokenized equities, stablecoins, you know, ultimately all of these financial markets run 24/7. How do you think that is going to spill over into the blockchain and the tokenized world? And yeah, just what do you what do you think are the implications of a 24/7 financial market? \>\> Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to take a first stab. Uh that's a big picture question, so I'll give a big picture answer. Look, there are lots of positive implications. The the world is more global, it's more efficient, there's a lot more trading activity, there's a lot more liquidity. I think assets, uh you know, get margined more easy and people get more activity out of their financial assets. Part of the reason, the other half of the reason why these big banks are moving in that direction is there's a lot of money to be made by people monetizing their assets in new ways once they're tokenized. I think that's a big big huge push behind it. There are also some risks that come from a 24/7 market that we see in crypto. There are periods of low liquidity. When you have leverage in the system and there's an economic shock in a period of low liquidity, you get events like 1010. And uh if you don't think that will happen when tokenized stocks exist, uh you know, maybe eventually, when the world is primarily monitored by agents, etc., things like when people sleep will not affect liquidity in any major way. But I suspect we're going to have more sort of liquidity cascades in the traditional market as it moves to 24/7 365 as well. So, look, I broadly think it's positive, but every positive comes with an echo risk. I think the echo risk here is shocks during low liquidity markets with leverage. We've seen in crypto the fragility that that introduces. Uh that will be introduced into other markets as well. I think that's probably inescapable. \>\> There's also this kind of element that pairs with that, which is the preparation to actually operate and respond in context of those incidents. You know, if you think about traditional financial institutions, they are not designed to operate from a resourcing and footprint and follow the sun model around 24/7 markets. And so, there's this not slow, probably quite long adoption to actually support a 24/7 market with an institutional wrapper around it. And I think that process is under appreciated in terms of how long it actually takes to build that and then get chief risk officers, chief compliance officers comfortable with an organization's ability to respond in an incident that occurs on Saturday night at 12:00 p.m. when traditionally markets are closed and they they're not staffed and designed around those events. And so, I think there's a growing curve that's that's going to play out over the next couple years around this. \>\> And to build on what both you guys are saying here and kind of bring it back to, you know, kind of the throughline of this conversation is that, you know, during those, you know, low liquidity, you know, highly leveraged markets, and those time frames, like you said, sell, you know, Saturday night, right, on a particular asset, what is the infrastructure that kind of surrounds or wraps, you know, the traditional market structure and and infrastructure around market hours, it's probably got an element of agentic to it. And and, you know, I'd imagine that when we're first getting this started, there's going to be some sleepless nights as people try to stay up as late as they can and manage it, you know, the way that it's always been managed. But, over time, you know, people are going to go to sleep and and agents will be the ones that are monitoring and maybe even making the transactions on this. And that is when I think we're really going to see the true power of smart contracts, the true power of a tokenized world, and, you know, the on-chain agentic economy really take hold out of necessity because these things are running 24/7. \>\> quality. We will have to get there. Uh there's no other way. You can have people staffed around the world, you still won't be able to respond uh in time, and you won't have sufficient risk understanding at all those depots. Um so that's the direction of travel. Look, I think that's a big big piece of it. Um yeah, part of why long-term I think the thesis uh behind something like NEAR is is pretty hard to debunk. ## [32:59] NRR Access and Sovereign’s Different Role · YouTube \>\> Yeah. And so to it to kind of bring this to a head here, um where can people find this NRR product map? Maybe you can just talk us through, you know, our audience who are kind of looking at, you know, kind of you know, adding this to their portfolio, where where can they get it? New York Stock Exchange, Arca. What are you know, where can they uh they can go learn more about this product in particular and get some uh exposure? \>\> Yeah, absolutely. You can come to bitwiseinvestments.com or to nrr.etf.com to learn more specifically about it. It should be available in every major brokerage account, makes it easy to access uh NEAR in a traditional brokerage account. It's not the only way. There's some other great opportunities. Uh Sal can Sal can talk about that. Um but we think for for plain vanilla exposure, it's a it's a neat way to do it. it. it. \>\> Sal? \>\> Sal? \>\> Sal? \>\> Hi. \>\> Where can uh people get some exposure to Sovereign? \>\> Yes, I mean same path. Um but and then just it's kind of funny. You you often get the question when you're running a treasury company like, well, talk to me about the comparison between an ETF. Aren't you competitive with Bitwise and their product? And my view is very much not. Right, we're super super excited for the Bitwise team to go live on this. They've been critical ecosystem partners for a long time publishing high-quality institutional buy-side research, running infrastructure on the network. Right, they were one of the first institutional MPC node operators that we onboarded as we scaled the system in 2026. They've been running validators. They actually power one of Sovereign's validators behind the scenes. Uh but the exposure pattern that you get between NRR and Sovereign is is very different. You know, we're building towards an operating business and an active participant governance. And this is really, you know, NRR represents a great opportunity to have the vanilla exposure to the protocol and it's yield run by a high quality institutional firm. So, congrats to you Matt and Hunter and the whole team. Very excited to see this moment. \>\> And thanks so much for uh joining here today, guys. Congratulations on, you know, the partnership between Bitwise and the NEAR ecosystem and the launch of NRR. Uh love to have you guys both on again sometime very soon. And uh yeah, appreciate you spending the time. \>\> Thanks for having us. \>\> Likewise. Thanks. \>\> Absolutely.