BlackRock Altcoin Thesis: The $20 NEAR Scenario

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AI agents are not going to love the crypto experience that most humans already hate. Bridges here, swaps there, check the gas, sign again, hope the transaction lands. That is not how a machine speed commerce scales. The near thesis is simple. You tell the system what you want, let competing solvers figure out how to get it done. And if that becomes a major way that humans and agents move across crypto, the upside scenario gets interesting fast. At our $4 entry point snapshot, a hypothetical $1,000 buy at 227 near tokens, looking at a broader scope $20 token multi-year scenario ends you with $4,500.

At a stronger $40 scenario, it ends up being worth $9,000.

Those are editorial adoption numbers. These are not promises by a long shot, and here is what needs to happen to see this play out.

Multi-year adoption scenario, not a deadline. At a $4.50 entry point right now, BlackRock's paper makes the macro case for AI agents acting on their own, evaluate the balancing and rules, the programming interfaces, and then execute authorized transactions with less manual work involved. It also says that the payment and compute market is still nascent, very early. You have to think about a freelancer with money on two different chains. They tell an assistant, give me $1,000 in USDC, where I can pay a vendor and get the best net result. They should not have to name every bridge and every liquidity pool and every transaction. Near Intense is built around that outcome. A user signs a desired result, and solvers compete to quote and execute it. Instead of demanding that you drive every turn, it actually focuses on the destination instead. That is a powerful idea for people, and for an agent, it's even more important. AI agents don't have emotions. They care about price, success, speed, and the rules. They do not care about showing off how many wallet pop-ups they can survive. And now here is the main value capture point. A giant amount of cross-chain activity does not automatically become near revenue or the native token demand. A solver may make the money, but the settlement can happen elsewhere. Gas can be sponsored. Another system can handle that execution, and near has the fees, the network security, and the staking in the design. Activity can matter, but there is no honest equation that turns every dollar into intent volume on the nearby order. Simply put, these are market cap scenarios, not fake cash flow math. BlackRock has described agents executing authorized transactions through programmable interfaces. Intents are our project-specific way of exploring this thesis. This is not a near recommendation directly from this paper, but a potential tailwind that might be caught by one of the biggest AI projects out there.

So now, let's take a look at the $20 near-token potential. You use future supply, assuming that 1.45 billion tokens are out, not a hard cap, $20 times 1.45 billion equals that $20 per token value. That means that near would need to become a preferred intent and chain abstraction rail. For a large amount of consumer and agent activity, it needs real usage that benefits the network, and the demand needs to outrun supply growth. Now, the chaotic potential in this scenario is a $40 near token. This is using a larger 1.75 billion future token assumption, and that is a $70 billion implied value. We have to increase that common denominator of circulating supply because there is no verified hard maximum supply here. If you ignore future supply, you can make almost any crypto project target look cleaner than it actually is. The dollar part of this stays very simple. $1,000 at a 450 entry point gets you right around 220 near tokens, and at $20, that ends up being $4,500.

Now, the more chaotic option at $40 near token, that bag ends up being worth 9,000. No taxes, no fees, no staking rewards, or slippage or compounding included in that. And could it fall from the point that it's at? Absolutely. This potential could be washed away if the network ceases to be useful, and it fails to break above this midpoint resistance at $9.30.

We're on the verge of something massive being built out on the internet as we know it. And agents may simply choose to use cards or bank rails or closed apps. Bank rails, unlikely, but solvers can capture most of the economics. Competing chains can make the same user experience happen, and token supply can outgrow demand. Smart contracts, regulatory problems, and liquidity risks are all real. But a future where software says, get this done instead of walk me through the plumbing is a future where intents make a whole heck of a lot of sense.