NEAR Protocol Falls After Bitwise CIO Endorsement

NEAR fell from an Oct. 8 open of $5.34 to about $4.49, after briefly touching $4.30 intraday, while the token’s earlier advance had taken it to roughly three times its August low near $1.60. The pullback came as technical indicators flagged an overheated market: the relative strength index had been above 80 earlier in the week and the MACD had already turned bearish at the start of October, with the red histogram bars widening.

Hougan’s argument centered less on speculation and more on usage. He pointed to NEAR Intents, the network’s swapping business, which generated $4.8 billion in monthly volume in September, up from less than $500 million a year earlier and above the prior peak of $3.65 billion in November. For supporters, that gives NEAR a clearer revenue-style use case than many small-cap crypto assets that depend almost entirely on sentiment. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin has framed that vision around a future where users need centralized exchanges less often and AI agents execute more of the transactions.

That is the bull case: a token tied to real transaction activity and a product that appears to be scaling quickly. The bear case is that the market may already have priced in much of that promise. A token that runs nearly 200% in one quarter and then spikes to overbought levels can be prone to sharp reversals once buyers exhaust themselves, particularly in a sector where liquidity is thin and narrative moves can outrun adoption.

For investors, the key question is whether NEAR Intents can keep expanding enough to justify the rerating. If volumes hold near September’s record and the broader crypto market stabilizes, the token could regain traction. If not, the recent selloff may prove that Bitwise’s endorsement marked a local top as much as a fundamental milestone.