NEAR Protocol ETF Pulls In $35 Million Right After a Token Exploit

A regulated bet on NEAR is now trading on Wall Street. It arrives months after a bug in a popular token on its network let an attacker drain balances with no stolen keys and no phishing link.

Bitwise's spot NEAR ETF started trading on NYSE Arca on September 29 under the ticker NRR, and investors did not wait around to find out if it would work. The fund pulled in roughly $35.5 million in net inflows on day one, according to Yellow.com, pushing total assets to $36.5 million within its first session. NEAR itself ran from around $4.60 toward a high near $5.57 before slipping back into that range. Daily trading volume swelled to $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion: a sign this wasn't a quiet, low-conviction pop.

Bitwise is staking the NEAR held inside the fund, targeting close to a 5% yield on top of whatever the price does, while charging a 0.75% annual sponsor fee. Coinbase Custody holds the underlying tokens. That combination, price exposure plus a yield most spot crypto ETFs can't offer, is exactly why NRR's launch numbers matter more than a typical ETF debut.

Here's the part that makes the inflows more interesting: NEAR is pulling in institutional money just months after a major token in its ecosystem exposed a basic implementation flaw. In late April, Fireblocks' blockchain monitoring team flagged unusual activity around SWEAT, a fitness rewards token with a large retail base on NEAR. Someone was draining wallets without phishing links, without compromised private keys, and without the victim signing anything.

The cause traced back to a single missing line of code. NEAR's token standard, NEP-141, relies on a callback called ft_resolve_transfer to refund unused token balances after a transfer. In a properly built contract, that function is locked down with NEAR's #[private] macro, which checks that only the token contract itself can call it. SWEAT's implementation shipped without that macro. One victim lost more than 8.5 million SWEAT tokens, worth roughly $170,000 to $250,000, in a single hit. The Block, citing Blockaid, reported that the attacker stole roughly 13.71 billion SWEAT tokens, 65% of total supply and worth $3.5 million at the time, before the team paused the contract and restored balances.

It didn't stop there. After identifying the SWEAT flaw, Fireblocks went looking across NEAR's ecosystem for the same mistake and found it again in HOT, a governance token with more than 22 million holders. SWEAT balances were restored, HOT maintainers patched the same flaw before it was exploited, and no one walked away with the tokens. But the episode exposed something uncomfortable. A basic access-control omission, the kind of bug a code review should catch, sat live in two tokens serving tens of millions of wallet addresses on the chain NEAR is trying to sell as the infrastructure layer for AI.

Why the money came back anyway

So why would an ETF sponsor and a wave of day-one buyers show up five months later? Part of it is simple timing. AI-linked tokens broadly have been outperforming the rest of crypto. NEAR has leaned harder into that story than almost any other large-cap chain, branding itself around user-owned AI agents and what it calls chain abstraction: the idea that an AI agent should be able to act across multiple blockchains without a human routing each transaction manually. NEAR Intents, the product built around that pitch, now reports more than $30 billion in cumulative cross-chain volume across 35 chains.

That is not a wallet-draining bug fixed quietly and forgotten. It is a growth number institutional allocators can point to. NEAR has also cut its maximum annual token inflation from 5% to 2.5% and started routing protocol revenue into buybacks. Those moves make the supply-side math more attractive to anyone buying through a staking-enabled ETF rather than trading the spot market directly. Its v2.13 upgrade added dynamic resharding for scaling and ML-DSA-65 post-quantum signatures, the kind of under-the-hood work that doesn't move headlines but does show up in due diligence decks.

None of that erases what happened with SWEAT and HOT. A missing access check is not a sophisticated attack vector, it's the sort of thing a competent audit is supposed to catch before a token ever reaches a few hundred million dollars of combined exposure. Fireblocks catching it before user funds were permanently lost is a save, not proof the ecosystem's contract review process is where it needs to be. Frankly, an ETF sponsor doing diligence on NEAR this fall had every reason to ask who else on the network skipped that macro.

What the market is actually pricing in right now looks less like confidence that the problem is solved. It looks more like a bet that AI-narrative tokens are back in favor and NEAR is the cleanest regulated way to get exposure to that trade. The $35 million that showed up on day one came through a custodian, a staking wrapper, and a prospectus, not through a NEAR wallet directly exposed to whatever contract bug turns up . That's a meaningfully different kind of buyer than the retail wallets that got drained in April. Worth remembering: the two groups are taking on different risk even when they're buying the same asset.

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