SVRN CEO: NEAR is Hitting On Revenue, Privacy, And AI At Once

**Robbie** (0:00)
Here in Connecticut, we are talking with Sal Ternullo, the man behind SVRN, the DAT for Near, the development company, a friend of the show, and a lovely, lovely man in a nice sport coat. Sal, great to have you.

**Sal Ternullo** (0:18)
Thanks, man, I appreciate the warm intro.

**Robbie** (0:20)
Yes, sir.
We've been talking about it. What a couple weeks for Near, right? I mean, probably surpassed a lot of our expectations. Take us back, a couple weeks back, we got this kind of trifecta. We got Arthur Hayes talking about it. Obviously, this kind of like AI agents using intents, using near intents confidentially. The TVL has been rising. People are kind of getting it. Take us back, last couple weeks, what's been going on on your side, in your mind? How have you been processing kind of like what the market's reaction has been?

**Sal Ternullo** (0:49)
Yeah, I mean, this is, I think if you guys remember the first time we chatted, probably four or five months ago now, we kept talking about this market mispricing. Like this is the perfect cohesive technology platform, vertically integrated products, with value accrual mechanics to near. And I think the market is now finally understanding how to underwrite near as an asset, which is not as a comparable L1 basis. You have to really think about revenue generation and market opportunity around Intense and Near AI as well.
And I think there's also even as recently as this morning, Arthur from Defiance was making a point, like Intense TAM is not crypto to crypto swaps. Intense TAM is the commercial architecture of Intense being expressed in the real economy. So that might be the example Ilya always gives of like, I want to deliver steel to this factory for this build. It's the architecture of a commercial deal where payments are a layer of settlement. And we're just really kind of scratching the surface in terms of the initial opportunities and use cases around it. So repricing in the asset, obviously we've seen a lot of uptake in terms of Arthur and many other KOLs picking up on it. We've also seen massive inbound from institutional investors in the liquid fund category.

**Robbie** (1:57)
More on the AI side, on the revenue story side, like what's the exciting part for them?

**Sal Ternullo** (2:02)
Mostly digital asset funds to be clear. Like they're underwriting the AI opportunity, the privacy narrative and seeing near uniquely positioned in that context. But the amount of inbound, like next week we have our backer summit.
It's going to be the most widely attended backer summit, like hundreds of funds will be there. And there's a lot of folks that are taking positions. So I think we're just stabilizing here a little bit of chop sideways through the summer and we're going to be up for the end of the year.

**Andy** (2:28)
Despite Bitcoin's struggles.

**Sal Ternullo** (2:30)
Struggles. I mean, this is one of the, on a statistical basis, near and Bitcoin over the last 30 days have had a negative correlation.

**Andy** (2:36)
Right.

**Sal Ternullo** (2:37)
It's crazy. I mean, I've never, I've been doing this for a long time. I've never seen alts have negative correlations to Bitcoin, like hype, Zcash, near, a select few others with real fundamentals. And what's interesting is like, it's all fundamentals driven that's driving this negative correlation. Obviously with the sell off with the stretch news yesterday, and then Arthur talking about the dump in context of macro and midterms, everything started to recorrelate on the way down.
But I've just, I've never seen relationships between near or other assets in the alt space to Bitcoin, like what we've seen in the past few weeks.

**Andy** (3:12)
How long do you think it lasts? This discorrelation, because it's not just uncorrelated, at least for a little while, it felt like they were actually divergent.

**Sal Ternullo** (3:20)
Yeah, they were negatively correlated. Near was performing, moving up 170% in 90 days, and Bitcoin was flattened down through that period. Yeah, I haven't looked at the charts to say this is unprecedented. There's not been another example of this, but from an anecdotal experience perspective, I've not seen it.

**Andy** (3:38)
And so the question was, how sustainable? How long do you think this lasts?

**Sal Ternullo** (3:42)
That's a good question. I was actually just talking with one of our team members, Frank Camato, about this. Do we expect this negative correlation to persist? And I think people are going to be taken by surprise with Clarity Act. I'm in the camp of, I was just saying on stage, that I think it's an 80 plus percent probability, despite the heat that we're getting from Jamie Dimon and many others being vocally against it.