Matt Hougan & Sal Ternullo: NEAR Is One Of The Best Positioned Assets In Crypto

Matt Hougan (0:00)

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.

Robbie (0:07)

My name's Robbie and you're watching The Rollup, 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. And what's up, guys? Welcome back to The Rollup. I'm Robbie and we've got a big show for you guys here today. Sal and Matt Hougan from Bitwise and SVRN. And these guys, congratulations to these guys because they just launched the NRR on New York Stock Exchange, the latest near ETF.

And we're going to hear about it. Sal has been running SVRN for a while on the Treasury company side of things, a 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.

And so this is the first US spot near ETP, 75 basis point management fee, in-house 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 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 the most recent wave of adoption here on NRR? Good to see you guys again.

Matt Hougan (1:41)

It's great to be here. Why don't you take it away, Sal? I'll follow up.

Sal Ternullo (1:44)

Yeah, I mean, it's been a good ride. We have had 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 intents.

We put out a piece, I think, in Q1 that really covered the bottom up case for investment, which was complementary to a more target market driven approach that Bitwise had released maybe six months prior. I think what we saw over the past 30 days, 45 days was really just this repricing event that was always on the horizon and really just finally caught up. 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 30, 45 days.

Matt Hougan (2:30)

Yeah. I just toss in to completely agree with that. I think for a long time, people were thinking about Nier 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 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 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 probably well positioned to continue.

Robbie (3:13)

Very, very cool. Yeah, we've been tracking this as well, near big partner on the AI side for us. But generally, I mean, the intense 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 to aggressively reprice.

You know, Sal, you've been in the game for a while. This most recent announcement from Bitwise NRR 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 NRR now? And ultimately tell us a little bit more about the product.

Matt Hougan (3:53)

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 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. The precise timing, I wish we had done it like three weeks earlier for the benefit of our investors. It can't be perfect, but it was an alignment of 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.