A new financial instrument trading under the ticker $NRR now provides a way for investors to hold the NEAR protocol in a brokerage account. Bitwise launched the fund on the NYSE Arca exchange on September 29 as the first spot exchange-traded product for the asset available in the US. The fund charges a 0.75% management fee and utilizes in-house staking to capture the protocol's approximately 5% staking rewards.

The NEAR network serves as a transaction layer for user-owned AI and has a market capitalization of roughly $6B. Its NEAR Intents feature has processed more than $32B in volume over the last year, and its transactions typically finalize in about 1.2 seconds. To manage its economy, the protocol recently halved its annual inflation to 2.5% and established a fund for token buybacks.