Is NEAR the BEST AI Crypto? | from Crypto School Live Crypto Training
This Wednesday investing session focused on a single token: NEAR. Not financial advice — do your own research. The goal here is to walk through how the project was evaluated in the video, from category and business model to token supply and chart structure, so you can apply the same process to any AI crypto you're looking at.
Why Category Matters Before Price
On CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, most tokens get tagged with a long list of categories, but there's usually one that actually defines the project. NEAR's main category is layer one — but not a generic layer one. It's a layer one built specifically for AI.
That distinction matters because of the thesis behind it: if AI agents become the primary users of the internet, they need rails to operate on. The example used in the session was simple. You tell your assistant you need a dentist appointment. Your bot talks to the dentist's bot, they negotiate a time, and it lands on your calendar. Multiply that by ten or fifteen agents per person, plus every business running its own, and agent traffic could dwarf human traffic.
NEAR positions itself as the coordination layer for that agentic economy. Three products were highlighted: Ironclaw (an AI agent that connects tools and runs workflows), NEAR AI Cloud (which runs in a sealed environment for privacy and security), and the marketplace. Think of them as three potential revenue-generating pillars rather than three features.
The Gold Rush Framing
The analogy used was the gold rush. Some people made money digging. Others made money selling shovels. Investors can back a handful of diggers and hope two out of a thousand hit, or they can back the toolmaker. NEAR does a bit of both — it sells tools to agent builders and charges for use of the underlying highway.
That's the same lens the session applies to any token: who's building it, what are they building, and how do they make money? If you want to go deeper on that approach, it's worth learning how to evaluate a crypto project like a stock investor before you look at a single candle.
The founders add credibility here. One came from Google research, the other from Microsoft. Around 2017 they set out to build AI software, found no infrastructure capable of supporting it, paused, and built the infrastructure instead. That became NEAR.
Tokenomics and the Numbers Mentioned
Some projects have a fixed supply, like Bitcoin. Others can mint. For NEAR, all tokens have been allocated — circulating supply currently equals total supply. That means market cap and fully diluted value match, and there are no unlock cliffs waiting to hit the chart. If you find that distinction confusing, this breakdown of the difference between market cap and fully diluted value clears it up.
More can still be minted, so the token is inflationary today. With enough agentic use and fee generation, it could flip deflationary — generally a positive for price over time.
Key figures cited: roughly 50 million active users as of September 2025, cumulative intents crossing 6 billion by April 2026 (transaction volume, not revenue — think Visa reporting trillions in volume), and over 800 projects funded with more than $45 million. No spot ETF exists yet, but Grayscale and Bitwise have both filed. Spot matters because the underlying asset has to actually be purchased, and ETFs open the door to advisors and institutions who won't manage wallets for a hundred clients.
The Chart Setup
NEAR sits around $2, down roughly 90% from its 2021 all-time high near $20. An overlay drawn back in May 2025 was left on the chart — price came down but held above the zero line. The view expressed was that a return to the 100% line, roughly the old high, would be about a 10x from current levels.
The broader context: altcoins are near multi-year lows. When the market turns, certain narratives tend to move before others, and AI is currently the hottest one. If you're tracking that rotation, these indicators that signal an altcoin season are a useful reference point.
For traders who want access to smaller AI-sector tokens that major exchanges don't list, a platform like MEXC is often where that liquidity lives — here's a look at how to find and buy emerging altcoins on MEXC if that's part of your research process.
Want to go through this analysis live and ask questions in real time? The Crypto School community at skool.com/crypto-profit runs these investing sessions weekly, with the full classroom library on market cap, fully diluted value, and prior NEAR breakdowns included.
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