The market still prices $NEAR like an L1 that missed its moment. It's 74% below its 2022 high @Bitwise prices it as the chain AI agents run on, with a $155 base case for 2030. That's about 30x from $5.26 BlackRock's research paper "The Machine-Native Economy" describes the same outlook. Agents that find, buy, and pay for compute on their own In the paper's words, agents "query real-time marketplace APIs to compare available capacity by price, performance, latency, location, and hardware specialization," then pay "on a per-use, per-model-token, or per-job basis" NEAR already runs two pieces of that: 1. NEAR Intents: you say what you want and solvers route it across chains. $33.99B in volume to date, $4.84B in the last 30 days (DefiLlama), and its fee share has bought back NEAR since February 2. NEAR AI Cloud: private inference inside secure hardware, now a provider on OpenRouter, and running private sessions in Brave's Leo assistant When I asked Matt Hougan on @MilkRoadDaily whether Bitwise's call was absurd, he said NEAR could 40x or 50x, and that "doesn't strike me as absurd if it actually executes on this vision" His framing: Intents alone roughly justifies today's price, and the AI goal comes "like a moonshot for free" For context, $155 a NEAR works out to about a $200B market cap. That's still below ETH's $298B today Wall Street is already buying in. Bitwise's spot NEAR ETF launched Sept 29 and took in $35.5M on day one, which Hougan called "a Bitcoin ETF style success" It's important to say that these price predictions are ambitious, and not necessarily going to play out in NEAR's favor. Ryan Rasmussen said their model assumes "a very high likelihood that this doesn't work out," and the bear case in the report is $1.63 If agents end up buying their own compute, the chain built around that job looks cheap at a $6B market cap It's a risky bet, but the upside is a huge moonshot. Full disclosure: $NEAR is a position in my Milk Road PRO portfolio. Our PRO team was early to $UNI (+54.8%), $AERO (+93.7%), and $SOL (+39.1%) Try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days, link in bio: @BitcoinJesusETH