NEAR Is Betting Everything On AI Agents | Roundup

Transcript

There's a big narrative right now near I think of AI and I think everyone listening to this podcast can see that. The question really is like okay are their agents actually using this right now? Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. What's going on everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Beler. You got me and Zave. This week we have dropped the dead weight. Uh it is the only It's the two A players on the show.

Just kidding. Uh Miles can't make it today, but uh it'll be a good one. We're talk talking about You know what? I I think the theme of the next couple months will be positivity in crypto. Um what do you say to that, Z? >> Sounds good. Uh hello to to all listeners. Um yeah, no, I'm very much looking forward to some some more optimism. I've had a few takes the last few months where it's been uh yeah, it's been hard times. I think everyone in the industry can admit that uh definitely there's been some easier times in crypto. There are some people coming and going and ideas changing but uh there's a few things happening including something we'll talk about on the show today which I think are some little rays

of of light which I think can get us out to the end of the tunnel. So yeah like if you believe in four year cycles which I definitely do then we have you know three or four months left of of pain. So I I typically try and take painkillers when when I have the pain and I think one of the best remedies for pain can be yeah looking at what's working in the space and also potentially not just what's working but also like where it's going to go in the next few years because I I do I was saying to Mike pre-show that in private markets right now a lot of preede companies in particular there's some really great ideas uh using crypto so I think uh this has given me hope alone that there are some great teams to come out in the next

12 18 months and I think this new cycle is really starting right now it's been six months of sort of understanding AI, how it impacts crypto, uh obviously regulation as well. But I think now, you know, we're almost in July, second half of the year, and I think second half of the year is going to be, yeah, a lot more optimistic than the first half. So, good to kick things off with this show. >> I agree. I agree. Um, I also, you know, we were talking about it before this show, but just for, you know, for listeners, I think part of the reason why it, I mean, there's just a four-year cycle pricing dynamic going on here, but, you know, we had a lot of ideas in crypto. Everything's a meme, fees don't matter, all that stuff. And a lot of the early joiners of crypto joined for

reasons that are sort of being invalidated or semi-invalidated or, you know, if you were if you were an adrenaline junkie gambler, um, crypto is the best place for you. But now that's not the best place. It might not be the best place for that anymore. Uh I don't know. Maybe maybe it still will and you know eat these words and they'll be selling dumber than me coins and come back. Who knows? But I I think that the the skill sets that are being rewarded right now longer termer value creation you know on the fun side helping you know businesses scale uh and then scaling and consolidating businesses.

Those are skill sets that haven't really they didn't line up with some of the early joiners of crypto. So I think there's an ideological unfurling and then there's also the price action. But the good news is all that stuff is going to get fixed. Uh because yeah, we have no option but to build our way out of this and we will. So that's >> that's exciting to me. I I remain that's still my framework for what's happening right now. Um and I think it's exciting. >> Yeah. I I mean absolutely. I think we spoke last podcast about uh the period now where there's a lot of scaling businesses obviously including Block Works itself. you know an amazing crypto company still scaling and many teams now I mean you see it in the data as well there's a lot more funding going to sort of series A series B than preede and

seed I think this is kind of maybe shortish term for the next six 12 months I could see that continuing but I do think probably in 12 18 months time you'll see more preed seed funding again as we enter this new cycle but um yeah it's exciting I think you know I know Mike you you really like the sort of scaling era of crypto which I'm also extremely bullish on and you know actually making sure that the technology gets adopted. At the same time, as a more venture investor, I think it's also really exciting. Some of the teams I'm speaking to now are really pushing the limits when it comes to, you know, blockchain technology itself. And Mike and I were speaking pre-show about how I'm going a bit more into sort of research mode and, you know, looking at sort of some research coming out,

whether that's to do with blockchain infra or agents or quantum or whatever it is. I think we will have like a kind of new research phase, I think, for crypto in the next year or two in particular, especially as quantum comes and AI continues to improve. So there's a lot of stuff at both ends of the spectrum I think when it comes to like consolidating businesses, scaling businesses as well as like new types of ideas and new markets. So I think it's actually yeah very interesting time to be staying in crypto, staying in the course and you know obviously still massively big on AI and following that actively every day. But I think for those left and those listening to this podcast still like congratulations.

You're one of the very few left in the crypto industry and I think hopefully you'll be handsomely rewarded in the next year or two. >> Definitely. I 100% agree with that. I I I think that also the next generation of builders and by the way the reason also outside of you know my own book and having helped build and scale a business uh for the last eight years so obviously I'm a little bit biased but it's also what needs to happen that the chief complaint is none of this stuff does anything and doesn't create revenue well what you need to do is it requires a skill set there needs to be consolidation and winners and a big outcomes that get people excited so that's that's just my framework for what I think the industry needs Um anyway, speaking of scaling intersection of AI

and crypto, today we're going to be talking about one of the few protocols at the moment which is generating attention, Near. Um so Near has done pretty well um year to date from a from a price uh standpoint. It's just one of these few tokens that's up uh and people are excited about it and it's out outside of just price um alone you know there are also some metrics which people are excited about. So really what's taking off and working on the nearest side of things is uh intense. Um, so this is an old buzzword. If you're listener of bell curve over many years, you will have heard us talk about intense a lot. Uh, usually within the context of interoperability,

multi-chain dexes, um, MEB, that type of thing. Um, and you know, if you're sitting there thinking, well, come on, we're past the infra phase and that was 2023 and 2024 talk. I think that Intense, a lot of the work that was done in Intense is going to pave the way for how AI and crypto ultimately end up intersecting. Zave, can you just give listeners a quick overview of what um what these things are and why we're talking about it within the context of near?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I I'll do my very best and admittedly it's been a while since I've gone as deep in Near. funnily enough we you know we know the founder quite well from our time at chorus one back in the day but you know when I was looking at near back in sort of 2021 around the time it launched a lot has changed and their focus has changed the technology has changed um now they have quite a few things going on with the chain it's almost like a network of networks if I had to explain it in a oneliner uh I can dive deeper into what that kind of means but essentially now near has come out with quite a few technologies in the sort of past I don't know 12 24 months which makes it easy to or easier to transact across chains and

they do this with a few different types of technologies. One is called chain signatures which is sort of multi-party computation crosschain control. So essentially they make it easy for users they abstract key management to use multiple chains at the same time all from near chain itself and so users don't have to worry about the complexity on the back end. Um, another thing they've really dived deep into recently, as you mentioned, Mike, is Intense. Um, so Intense they've actually had for quite some time, but I think it's only really gained steam more recently, maybe in the last 12 to 18 months. We were talking pre-podcast about near integrating with the Zcash wallet, which I'm forgetting the name of right now, but they managed to drive a lot of volume for Zcash users that wanted to

swap from Zcash to Bitcoin. And we saw a chart before Mike that their volume peaked around October 2025 when it comes to sort of fees and as what was volume at the time from Zcash people holding the asset wanting to swap into other assets natively uh in a very easy way. So NI sits at this very interesting intersection now of like they have this infrastructure which makes it very easy to use multiple chains at once using some fancy key crypto fancy key cryptography and technology they built over the last few years. At the same time, maybe also a year or two ago, forgive me on the timelines, they started moving more in this AI direction, um, you know, of course, with an infra background at Chorus one, even when I was still at Chorus one, funnily

enough, uh, I I went quite deep into like inference as something that blockchain infrastructure could enable. And at the time, I saw tees as this way which made the most sense to bring inference on chain and NI has since become the leader in this actually. So NI made a bet very early that uh inference should be private and secure and verifiable and the best way of doing this would be with tees which typically in the past have been like less secure and uh less liked by blockchain technologists because maybe there% less secure than zero knowledge cryptography but zero knowledge to prove AI work was done and then bring that on chain using zero knowledge is very expensive. So NIA chose TE they're now

the winner I would argue in in this kind of TE private secure inference uh that's happening offchain and they're partnering with new kinds of AI teams like Venice AI and Venice AI is its own private inference kind of network which is you know actually distributing users to to near infrastructure where they're sort of computing inference on behalf of these Venice users. So I guess the reason why I'm mentioning all these things is because if you put all of them together, you actually get the architecture of NI. So NI now as another way of thinking about it is like a kind of crosschain network. So you can easily, you know, swap assets across chains. You can also use AI in a way which is probably more private and secure than some other

chains. And you know the reason why you would work crosschain and why you would use AI in the first place is to get the outcome that you want. And so this intent architecture that I'm sure anyone listening to this podcast who has listened to it for quite some time understands. It's like you want something to happen. You don't care how it happens. You want the best price and you want it to get the outcome. Uh this is happening now also in AI actually outside of crypto. So when you prompt you can say hey I want want to buy these shoes by tomorrow. Then the agent actually works out you know obviously how to solve that intent and then get you the outcome you want. There's a lot of similarities between like blockchain intents and AI intents and they're sort of merging and I think MIA is the best

way of expressing this merge of if we have this intent where we want to take any action on any blockchain uh how do we do that and N gives us a way to do it using their crosschain infrastructure and their verifiable inference to get us the best outcome using their solvers and their network and so more recently as you mentioned Mike the price has been doing quite well um You know, I I guess if one had to speculate on why this might be more recently in NIA on top of these technological changes and gluing these pieces together, um they've actually built further value acral to the token near itself. And so now you're sort of seeing fees and volume grow over time and in the past a lot of these a lot of this value acrewed to solvers the

people trying to fulfill intents um you know offchain but now a lot of it is actually acrewing to near itself. And so we spoke pre-show, Mike, about the fact that NIA is actually buying back about half of its emissions right now, which might seem like not a large amount at the moment, but if you have a thesis that agents will continue to come on chain and the agents will need secure private inference and the near economy will continue to grow over time, there could be a case to be made where they start buying back and you know, demand actually outweighs supply. So yeah, it's it's definitely at an inflection point right now. It's one of the darlings of this bare market. I think they've done great work with mind share to technology to actual use cases to revenue to business model to value cruel. So

definitely shining light as mentioned before. So good to talk about on this podcast. >> Yeah, I think I mean they've been after this for a long time. We did an episode on uh like a multi-chain future. This Hart Lambert was the co-host of the season and must been at least two years ago. Um and we had Ilia from the year on because they had a really interesting architecture that allowed you to they you know they leverage um you know an MPC infrastructure and they allow you to on the Neo blockchain you have you know multiple different accounts um you know across other chains and execute uh you know arbitrary actions wherever and I think that started that kind of um Zcash

wasn't super functional and up until about 3 months ago no wanted to buy or sell Z like trade Zcash very much. So I think that Neo has kind of come up with Zcash as being an an easy way for people to trade. Same with Venice uh and some other onchain tokens that people like. And then the and then the AI narrative, right? Like Ilio was on is cited in the original all attention is all you need paper on transformers from Google. He's actually bonafideed, you know, AI um researcher and thinker. Uh, and then Jensen patted him on the arm one time and near pumped like 50% that day. So I I think I think it's a healthy amount of like not like anything new is going on with Near in the last month. Actually,

their fees are at least on the intent side are down. Um, but I think a lot of the architecture that they've built here is directionally right. Um, and what in and I think like what when agents do come on chain, they're going to use some kind of architecture that looks like this would be my guess. Yeah. Yeah. I think uh I guess what investors are bullish on right now is just agents coming on chain and there isn't really great ways to express that. Another way you could express it is buying like base token or something like that in future you know if and when it exists. They have of course X42 standards etc. I think this entire agent space is actually super early and of course very hyped because you're seeing what's

happening outside of crypto. AI is exploding crypto. people were like, I need to get a cut of this and something I actually understand and what do I invest in for upside and to be fair to to give it to NI, I think their numbers look good and they're pretty sustainable. Like the volume's growing, fees are growing. And also, I think like you said before, Mike, you know, Ilia's AI background, he's not like a sort of hype person. He's a very deep thinker. He's been working on this problem for several years. So you have to give them credit in terms of like you know even the crosschain work which as you mentioned right you had a entire season on crosschain all different architectures you know as as you know I was a cosmos person back in the day like you could even make the argument that

near is winning the crosschain race like right now as like a standalone chain which I'm not sure if anyone really had that thesis actually going back a few years like if you go back to your podcast two years ago I'm not sure one person would have said like there will be one chain and then you'll be able to interact with all other chains from this one chain and that chain will capture that um maybe cosmos hub and polka dot in different ways that was like the idea but like Nia's first go to market wasn't really a crosschain layer uh there are also kind of interesting things to think about I guess when it comes to Nia's own distribution they are working with like several providers like you know leafy and you know we mentioned Venice and some other kind of wallets you know Zcash wallet etc so there are always

probably going to be questions around revenue shares um and also like the end user they own I think they claim they have tens of millions of users etc which to some extent they have some relationship there but they might not actually own the end user relationship with 100 million users then the question is like would they prefer to own those users or own the agents and there's another question here I think around like I guess the actual like there's a big narrative right now and near I think of AI and I think everyone listening to this podcast can see that the question really is like okay are their agents actually using this right now I spend quite a bit of time in this topic you know every week just researching what's actually happening and I saw a stat uh late last week that mentioned that

something like 0.001% of all stable coin volume is like agent driven right now. So like if you look at that obviously there's a lot of hype versus like what's actually being done. I think that's also an open question on like the chain agents will use and why and then like N's whole tagline is userowned AI. So the question is like okay user owned AI is at like Hermes. Another thing Near actually did which actually might be worth talking about this podcast which I didn't talk about before um you know around the time the open claw and everything went live near NI actually came out with their own version of openclaw but in a more private secure sandbox using tees and that was ironclaw.

uh super cool like we used it actually and it was really nice maybe had some less developer tooling than open core itself but they have been experimenting a lot with this kind of like userenerated AI which we are still learning even outside crypto what this means and how people will use it so yeah interesting times I think to dive into that as well >> yeah I mean I think uh one of the things that I'm a little bit unclear about at for the time being is what are the use cases for someone to use, you know, near's infrastructure to transact to do onchain swaps versus like what what is the market size for that going to be relative to something like hyperlquid relative to something like a centralized

exchange? I don't know. It's it feels one of the other positives that I think is happening right now is people are realizing the value of privacy um in a pretty big way. I mean, it's privacy is such a difficult thing to make a bet on because there's a bipartisan push in Washington away from private. No one's really pro privacy at at the moment or have been for a long time. Um, so you could say that would make it very valuable or it's kind of the one thing in crypto that might still be prone to regulatory push back or takeown and it's kind of tough to bet for that. Um, you know, but there's a confidential TVL, you know, which is sort of some of this activity that you're discussing on on Near, which has been going up, but it's still

relatively low. It's like 30 million or something like that. Um, and TVL is kind of a funky doesn't really tell you an enormous amount either. So yeah, um, the privacy stuff is interesting. Um, my my sense on providence for AI agents, it's the use case of that is still a little ways away. What do you think? Well, I think what's interesting, you know, it's a good question to ask because a lot of the private secure inference that blockchains are trying to enable actually suit like small businesses and enterprises more than cryptonative users. So the question is like will enterprises and small

businesses actually use verifiable inference using tees because I can see that happening in a much more likely scenario than I could with like someone like us trading on chain needing secure inference for some reason like at least for me right now like I don't have that need uh whereas like okay these businesses are using AI today and you know anthropic and open AI are trying to eat every application and commoditize everything and they're scared of like using these models because they're capturing all the data and they build the application of the business themselves. So there's a real need for them to use secure private inference because they don't want the models looking into what they using in or what they're doing in the first place. So I

guess for me there's a disconnect and this is not just for NIA. It's actually for a lot of privacy type things in crypto right now is that there's a compliance question of like okay or even like a sort of own your own data question. I think in crypto I was always someone that was a big believer in owning your own data and that thesis has been proved wrong quite a few times over the course of the history of crypto and I think NIA still has a user owned AI thing of like people care about the data etc. But maybe it's actually more businesses and SMBs. Like I don't know. Uh they could be tapping into that market at some stage soon. I don't know if it's already on the road map or who they're talking to. But a lot of the use cases now are more like Venice, more

like retail dominated kind of like the other question is like what kinds of models are they using? It's like Venice AI. I don't want to like overclaim here and I haven't done that much research, but I know like one of the use cases is kind of like uncensored AI models for, you know, use cases that potentially you and I wouldn't be [laughter] on on an AI model for every day, but for some things that are obviously hard to do that you'd be censored to on if you use anthropic or chatbt for example. So like that's probably but that >> kind of stuff.

>> What are you doing that you don't want? >> Great. There's a great tweet from shout out to Logan at frictionless. It actually cracked me up the other day. He was talking about what the use cases were. I think it was for Venice or something like that. And I think Kamani which you post this in the show notes. Kamani was like show me the metrics of Venice AI or something and who's using it and why. And like then Logan replied back saying like using it for explicit use cases. And then he's like be more specific. And then Logan replied back with this funny like that monkey meme that like goes like that that actually made me crack up. But um yeah, it's like I guess the point being here that um these use cases are somewhat niche I guess. So like you know near Venice etc

they have high valuations and and there is obviously value there and I think they're both great teams and products but the question is can you cross that chasm between like niche use case into institutional adoption like we have with crypto as a technology itself and I think when it comes to TE private inference etc we're still very early there in understanding that and not only that it's also extremely competitive outside of crypto so if that is actually the long-term market like who else is playing it like Nvidia Microsoft like some of these big companies that can probably very easily eat into that so then it goes back to your question mark of like is this cryptonative or not and does it just come back to like cryptonative mechanisms like swapping and if so should you be swapping on near or hyperlquid so I think these are all

open questions and near is set up really well to capture different kinds of paths the question will actually be I guess what market they end up dominating because I think they will dominate at least one the question is like what is a TAM where's the growth come from and also where's the focus going to be the next 12 24 months >> agreed agreed I think uh focus is something that near has historically struggled with as well. You know, I remember during that season that we did, if you went on the near site, there were like 20 different things that you could do or directions that they were which is just it's a lot, right? And I I think actually that's a commonality across many different businesses, foundations, whatever building in crypto. There have been so many flashy things. Um but I think if NE were to focus on, you know,

this use case um and building towards this, it's multi-year. um you know, you're probably building slightly too early, which is exactly when you want to be building. Um so yeah, I think if they can, you know, kind of knuckle down and focus on the agents interacting on chain and build, you know, if Miles were here, he'd be talking about things like permissions and making it very I mean, you just imagine agents are doing things on your behalf. You need to be able to set pretty granular parameters for them to do this. So they've already built the executionbased infrastructure. Now if they build you know the permissioning and that's pretty attractive I think. Um the the devil in the detail is always on

the timing front. Um I think another thing is like you know NI has such a big AI background. The question is like are they going to be AIdriven or crypto driven like and can you actually be both? And if you are both like what does it actually look like? um at least right now in crypto there's very few chains that really nicely straddle crypto and AI like maybe bit tensor is one I think near will be probably the second one but the question will be like what does that actually look like in terms of the inference that they've got is offchain right now first of all so like can you bring that inference onchain I look I think another thing we haven't even spoken about in this podcast is like the

kinds of agents that NRA is trying to appeal to so I got this put to me well recently I think it's really good framing. You know, you kind of went from agents going live, you know, maybe from businesses, etc. sort of six to a months ago. Then you had sort of personal agents exploding with, you know, sovereign or whatever, like open claw, etc. being able to allow us to access things across services using agents and allowed us to spin up our own agents. I think near is appealing more to this kind of like personal OS. And actually by the way which we haven't even spoken about yet but like I'm pretty sure at some stage NA was also an operating system as like a tagline. It was like and that was like back when we were very deep in Urbert and I know that they were

also looking at Ner as well at like a similar time. So it's like the question is okay can they hold the narrative down and is near still like an operating system like maybe but they're kind of like very generic words like near AI is like okay that's like a blockchain and AI but it's not very specific about exactly what it's doing and who it's appealing to. So yeah, again the question would be like who what agents are they appealing to and also like I I think the biggest upside in here is actually AI. I think they should actually double down there. But um it's still really early and I think like their user owned AI thesis I think is interesting but my question around the TAM is like how big is that TAM as well as like how competitive is that?

confidential computing will continue growing and they have that but why can't hyperscalers or whatever else serve that and yeah I am bullish if they move in this direction I would be maybe more bullish on like sovereign agents we were talking about earlier in this like earlier in the call pre-show of you know I I do think that sovereign agents will start using blockchain very soon but these will not be userowned and so if they can take a share of that market I think that's probably like six to eight months away from coming about depending on you know who you ask and if they somehow enable these sovereign agents to run businesses on chain they create their own economy then all of a sudden the market really grows uh and you can own that with near token there's better value acrruel that for me becomes very

very interesting as like maybe user not owned AI but like I think right now agents are still so early that even us with our own personal agents where I'm using agents today like I'm not necessarily using personal agents to like trade like I think that's been a mistake I've made actually the last six months of Like people are going to use agents to trade. Well, actually they don't. Like even traders don't use agents to trade. It's like they still put on the trades themselves most of the time. They might have a lot of the data and they might use AI for like what trades to put on, but the actual action of the trade itself quite often especially because AI is probabilistic not deterministic is still done by the trader themselves. So I guess the question will be like that execution itself which near targeting like how can

they make someone like me or other traders or whatever it else whoever it is feel like actually they can trust the chain enough to like they put on trades on behalf of the user and that would be real user owned AI but that seems quite early right now. Um yeah, early I I mean there's a lot of stuff that like I mean if you look at AI and how AI is being used, no one questions because you you because every single person at this point uses AI so extensively in their day-to-day. You're like I ask it these questions, it gives me these amazing answers. But when you actually start to look at jobs to be done and how good individual Asians are, it falls apart a little bit more quickly. And like two things that I would observe in software

is that there's kind of like there's the naive first version which we haven't moved past in terms of UX for LLMs. Like chat GBT and Anthropic they came out with the chatbot interface which is you know really interesting. is probably not the final form, but like how many other businesses came out with a generic AI chatbot like a you and you know it found its way onto product road maps is like hey we're going to have this AI chatbot but for finance or but for healthcare it's like not useful you would have wasted your time. Um people agents are going to trade on my behalf maybe but they have to get way better.

It it's it's like it feels just even from a product perspective like the naive first I have to do something iteration which obviously we have to get through. It's the skew it's the skumorphic idea before we get to the final form. So agents trading it's just the timing. I'm sure it'll work but the timing isn't I mean just really think about it. I I guess here here like maybe to use a hyperspecific example of something in that I think about at block works LLM charting like charting for LLMs is that that attractive like if anyone that actually makes graphs or charts on a regular basis like it's pretty smooth interface you like click what you want to do it's actually nice because you see options and there aren't you know

sometimes you don't really know exactly what you're trying to chart yet so you kind of like I want to see Ethereum price and oh I hadn't really thought about you know MVDV or whatever you know what I mean sometimes is you going to see your option and it doesn't take that much to just click a couple versus um I don't know whatever that new so having asking an LLM to save you two clicks is is not doesn't do very much versus I don't know uh I'm sure someone will I'm sure maybe the maybe the the right thing is building on you know suggesting more interesting charts that you otherwise wouldn't have thought I don't know but the it just it just doesn't feel like the form factor is there yet I don't have a bunch this stuff and that's like writ large across where software is integrating LLMs in

general. Um I don't think it's very creative yet. >> Yeah. I mean I as you know I'm the um resident AI bull on this podcast. So like I'm very bullish on capability continuing to improve. I guess there's an open question of like when agents will actually use blockchain. I think it's consensus that they will but maybe people don't know the sequence or at what time that will actually happen. I think in general like again just focusing on near here like and their sort of AI pitch at the end of the day like okay near AI uh if you look at the blockchain itself and like you know validators etc. Uh to the best of my knowledge I'm pretty sure that the validators aren't actually a part of the inference process itself. So like all of that is offchain. So like it's still

just like a blockchain at the end of the day. It's just like doing the exact same things as any other blockchain, but it manages to also settle inference, you know, on their blockchain as well. And from what I understand, I'm pretty sure any of that inference happening offchain and these TE GPUs that near runs could be verified on other chains as well. So the question is obviously there like okay like how actually differentiated is it long term like and maybe they bring it on chain at some point in time but at least like right now it's not there. The other thing I mentioned at the very start of the podcast is around like what is actually differentiated which other L1 are not doing this is like they're trying to be this kind of remote control of like other chains. They're not trying to be like really a blockchain with its

own like sort of economy happening just on near itself like something like Ethereum or Salana like Salana has all these applications liquidity it's very monolithic near is sharded okay so it's a different architecture in general but actually like a lot of these shards are to control assets on other chains so it's more like a remote control almost like a middleware like I don't want to claim as that but it's more it's not necessarily like a base layer thing it's kind of like on top of these other chains now and sort of you can control these chains from NIA which I think again is differentiated but is should that be valued in the same way as Salar and Ethereum. I mentioned before this podcast started to you Mike but you know mentioning again here the the ratios like the PS ratios etc are lower on on y

than there on ethereum. The question is like does that make sense or maybe it does make sense if it's not a liquidity hub like something like Ethereum these are just like open questions and then again when it comes like competition I think the the real elephant in the room with with Near is is actually X42 and like I think they're more competing with someone like Bass than they are with someone like Bit Tensor or or Venus or whatever else it is. So you can buck it near in this AI category, but again takes me back to my point. It's like, you know, is it actually purely AI or is it more the blockchain, you know, kind of layer one that's remote control that's allowing you to crosschain and maybe BAS actually helps them with X42.

If they can cut into the X42 interoperability agents working across chains, maybe NI comes up with something in future where like these agents working across chains all actually route through NI like that for me actually as a pitch could make sense as something that can be very valuable like long term, but right now there's I think probably zero dollars of this happening at the moment. So like I think we talked about in this podcast, but it's a question of timing and you know when this actually happens or not and I think it's very much a narrative right now in terms of like Arthur Hayes and some other people talking about you know how NA's going to pump a lot I guess in in the near future which could definitely happen like I'm not a trader but um I think as well there are some probably

other market mechanisms right now causing NA to have like a small run here but I think overall fundamentals look good. So, I actually like near long term. I'm watching very close. Nice. [laughter] I'm watching very closely to see. >> Is that a cat? >> I'm going to pretend it was. Um, watching very closely to see Yeah, I guess if it really converges more into AI and and and honestly what I would like to see from Near the most as someone very bullish in crypto AI is like can N actually spark a genetic adoption of blockchain rails. If NA sparks adoption and starts and initiates it makes me very bullish longterm on NE as like the AI blockchain intersection.

If NI doesn't spark it or initiate it and it's kind of happening on base or X 402 elsewhere and they're trying to like bring it back to Near or like put the narrative that they're kind of around it but they're not starting it, it makes me kind of wonder if their position is as defensible in their sort of blockchain AI sort of category. But um yeah, it's definitely something to keep an eye on in this market. It's one of the few things working. I don't think any of us really know why it's working. It's probably working for different reasons, including just good tech and and maybe early, but good timing to a big narrative. So, yeah, it'd be interesting to see where it goes in in the next six months.

>> Definitely. All right, Dave. Well, this was a fun one. I think we can wrap it here. Um, wishing well to Near and anyone that's catching a bit. And yeah, I know it's a little bit gloomy out there, but can going to continue to highlight things that are working, interesting. And if you're listening to this, I agree. You've already done the hard part. Just stick around, stay strong, um, and be well out there. >> Good luck out there, team. Cheers.