Digital Asset News host Rob discusses Bitcoin's long-term thesis, Trump's $1.3 trillion stimulus promise, and Near Protocol's AI agent payment potential
A solo crypto commentary and live stream Q&A session from the Digital Asset News channel.
Summary
Host Rob opens with a clip of President Trump promising $5,000 to every adult American citizen — a total of $1.3 trillion — framing it as further evidence that government currency debasement makes hard assets like Bitcoin, real estate, and precious metals essential investments. He reviews the Bitcoin four-year cycle, noting that prices today are roughly where they were in October 2021, rewarding patient dollar-cost averagers. The bulk of the episode focuses on Near Protocol, examining Bitwise's Matt Hogan's claim that Near could do a 40x if it wins the AI agent payment layer battle, supported by Near Intents' $4.88 billion in volume and nearly $32 billion in swaps across 35 chains, generating $52 million in fees over 12 months. Rob also covers Binance shutting down its mining pool, Kraken receiving full market approval in a new jurisdiction, and closes with a live Q&A touching on tokenomics for Near, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Trump's $1.3 Trillion Stimulus Promise and the Bitcoin Thesis
Rob: The thesis is playing out. As long as the government continues to debase the currency, I will keep buying Bitcoin. Welcome to the late night live stream — a little hectic day, but let's just jump into it.
First of all, President Trump posted a video a couple of weeks ago or so, and I found it interesting that it's been replayed and reposted. What he's promising is essentially $1.3 trillion to everybody if they do this particular thing. Just take a listen — it's about 30 seconds.
Trump (video clip): "I'm going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000. Democrat policies won't allow this to happen. In fact, the opposite — they're going to raise your taxes. If the Democrats win, you will have an economic depression. If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket and economic success for our country like we have never, ever seen before."
Rob: That's from the President's official X account. On this channel we're not political, so who you vote for is up to you — that's your decision. But the thesis I've always said is: as long as the government continues to print more dollars — and that's every government out there — and continues to debase the currency, we must invest into assets. I can't tell you which assets to invest into; I'm not a financial adviser. But I like real estate, I like precious metals, and I really like Bitcoin. I think these are the things that will stand the test of time, especially if something like this comes through.
Don't get too excited, because community notes will always get you. The note reads: "Apparent context needed. Trump previously promised two dividends and never followed through. In early 2025, Trump publicly backed a roughly $5,000 DOGE dividend — that didn't come to fruition. In November 2025, he promised a $2,000 tariff dividend — that didn't happen either."
So if this goes through, $5,000 for every adult American citizen works out to $1.3 trillion. And again, that's just a flash in the pan — that's what America does. We print money. And I have to tell you, as long as we continue on this long road, I think we're all going to be just fine with where we're at and what we're investing into.
Bitcoin Four-Year Cycle Review
I took a look back at the Bitcoin four-year cycle tracker. You can find this on Dante's Crypto — it's my website, it's free, and it always will be free. We can see that on November 22nd, 2021, Bitcoin was at $59,000, which was just 13% down from the all-time high of $67,000. If we fast forward roughly four years to November 22nd, 2025, we were 32% down from the all-time high at $85,000. Isn't that crazy?
If we move forward to where we are now — roughly October 13th — we're at around $83,495. It's essentially the same price. So we've had all this time to dollar-cost average and accumulate. The ones that were buying when we were talking about the 200-week moving average, as the currency continued to be debased and inflation went up, did pretty well. As we bought the lows around $58,000, I have to say the ones with the cool-hand patience — and I think many of you watching this video have that — probably did really well.
And you know who's doing really great? Michael Saylor. He's gone through his second year-long Bitcoin bear market and came out holding roughly 4% of all the Bitcoin — approximately 840,000 Bitcoin, correct me in the comments if I'm off. He's also got billions in cash and close to zero net debt. Just sticking around and being in the right place at the right time really helps out a whole heck of a lot. I know it seems like we're throwing sand in the ocean, but stick around — I think you're going to like where we're going.
Near Protocol and the AI Agent Payment Layer
Let me know what you think about all this in the comments, but let's talk about Bitcoin's broader ecosystem and then the altcoins. Bitcoin is going to do just great by itself — it usually does. It's the oldest and first cryptocurrency out there and has the largest potential for stable upside. But I think now is the time to really start thinking about those altcoins, those digital assets. What we should be focusing on — as I've talked about on the channel many times — is payments and tokenisation of real-world assets. And specifically, it's going to come down to AI agentic agent payments.
There was this comment from Matt Hogan from Bitwise. I want you to take a listen — it's about 20 seconds.
Matt Hogan (video clip): "That doesn't strike me as absurd if it actually executes on this vision. Remember, we think all finance will move over blockchains, and we think agents will be the primary drivers of finance. If you are the platform on which that takes place, we probably should have added another zero to that number."
Rob: What he's talking about in this clip is Near Protocol. Near has gone up and down, but it has a great founder — Ilya Polosukhin — who is responsible for the T in ChatGPT, and we'll get to that in a second. If we're talking about not where the hockey puck is but where the hockey puck is going, it's very difficult to predict these things — it could be anything. But what Matt brought up was pretty interesting. He essentially said that Near could do a 40x.
Let me be 100% clear on this: price predictions are worthless. Everybody's wrong, and I've got a couple of receipts to prove that. There's a link in the description — on every video I do where I talk about price predictions for 2021, everybody was wrong, including me. 2025, everybody was wrong, including me. However, there were massive gains to be made. So a 40x — is that the real deal?
There are two things to address. First, why is Matt talking about Near Protocol? The reason is because they just launched a spot ETP in the United States. I didn't realise this was happening. It launched on September 29th, 2026 — roughly two and a half to three weeks ago. There's a management fee of 0.75% and a staking feature; the trust stakes Near, which is pretty cool. You get a double dip — price appreciation and staking. I had to take a closer look because I'm always looking for the next thing and what I might be missing.
Near Protocol Valuation and Fundamentals
I said to myself, "Okay, a 40x sounds pretty ridiculous, but is it?" Near Protocol is in the top 25 — I believe it's around number 21 today, correct me in the comments if I'm wrong. The market cap of everything is $6.6 billion. At a 40x from there, you're looking at $263 billion, and the price of Ethereum puts its market cap at $307 billion. If you extrapolate from that as a base case, you get roughly a 31x. Right now Near is around $5. It had a monstrous run over the last 30 to 60 days — up over 120%. Of course it's down from its all-time high like everything else. But Bitwise's price prediction — and again, they're all wrong — is $155. There's definitely some massive upside here, and we just saw some massive swings. Near is really pushing the AI agentic protocol narrative. On the flip side, the bear case is around $1 to $1.60. We'll see.
The founder, Ilya Polosukhin — I think that's how you say his name — wrote a 2017 Google paper titled "Attention Is All You Need." The T in ChatGPT stands for transformer. Essentially what he was talking about — and don't quote me, I'm not an AI researcher — is that large language models don't just take word by word; they take everything in context and look at the meaning behind the sentence to figure out what's going on, and then spit out answers from there. Polosukhin wrote that paper while at Google, and ChatGPT integrated it, as did all the major large language models.
I actually had an interview with him about 18 months ago — I'll link it in the description. But essentially what he was talking about back then was AI agents and integrating them with Near Protocol. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, sure." Well, here we are.
Near Intents: The AI Payment Infrastructure
What Near is building for AI is this thing called Near Intents. You may have heard of it because they got hacked — maybe two weeks ago or so. But I tip my hat to them because they did their own investigative research on the blockchain, found out who it was, and said, "If you don't give us our money back, we're going to expose you publicly and you're going to have a lot of problems." And I'll be damned if they didn't get every single dime back. I'm looking at Near a lot harder now because they had the guts to do that and they pulled it off. They got hacked for about $3.8 million — not even $5 million — and they got every single dime back. Something to look at.
So what is Near Intents? You can swap across 35 chains in one click. For AI agents, they don't have time to figure out which rails to use or make 20 different cross-chain jumps to pay someone because they're the only one using a specific stablecoin. Near Intents just swaps across 35 chains in one click — fast AI pay. That's what they want. That's live.
They've also got private AI models running in locked hardware, meaning data doesn't get out — which is great if you want to protect your intellectual property. They have an AI agent marketplace: you hire an agent, payment is held in escrow, things get done, everyone's happy. It's like a Fiverr for AI. That's live. Private USDC payments. And there's a promise of becoming the payment layer for billions of AI agents, which is what Matt Hogan was talking about.
The real question is: how much money is it making? Near Intents has done $4.88 billion in volume in the last 12 months. They've done nearly $32 billion swapped in 12 months. They've had $52 million in fees, and $5.3 million of that was used to buy back NEAR tokens — which is a big play, as those tokens either get locked up or distributed as staking rewards. Not too bad.
Bitwise's Math on AI Agent Volume
Here's Bitwise's math. Agents could number 328 million, 500 million, or even a billion — we don't know. But let's say each agent does about 1,000 payments per year at roughly $5 per payment. That volume equals $1.6 trillion per year — and that could be super low or super high. Taking a 0.3% fee, you get $5 billion in revenue per year. Today Near generates about $26 million a year in revenue kept by the protocol. That's why the upside is so large — all they have to do is win the battle of AI agents. And since AI agents are going to be doing a lot of buying, arbitrage, and transactions, this could be big.
How Near Stacks Up Against Competitors
How does Near stack up against the best? Not too well yet. On-chain stablecoin balances: Ethereum has $145 billion, Tron $94 billion, Solana $15 billion, BNB $13 billion — and Near doesn't have much. It's new, but that's the reality. Chain fees from the last 30 days are minimal for Near. Tron collected $23 million in fees — congratulations, Tron.
The red flags for me: Near has lost over 54% of its stablecoin balance in the last year. Chain fees in a year total only $1.25 million at a $6.6 billion valuation. Maybe that's a growth-phase thing. And then there was the $3.8 million exploit on September 30th — though they got the funds back. The token is down 75% from its all-time high.
So it's credible. I like Ilya. I like the team. I like that they got that money back. But it's not proven yet. I will say this: I'm going to be buying a little Near going forward. I'm not going to put my entire life savings in because anything can go to zero. Remember my rule number one: it's all gone. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.
Technical Analysis on Near
Just to look at the trading side — and tip of the hat to traders, I can't do it — I'm looking at Wes's SMC bot. They nailed this one. The buy signal was around $1.58, they had a sell, then a buy back down at $1.42. Since that buy signal, which was in oversold territory, they got a buy signal and you could have bought at $1.56. Now it's around $5. It is in a slightly overbought condition. That's Wes's SMC bot.
Looking at Ivan Tech's money line: they got bullish around $2, bearish at $2.40 — kind of like maybe wanting to take some profits — then went right back to bullish at $2, and now we're at $5. Something to look at.
Binance Mining Pool Shutdown
Just to finish up the main content: Binance just announced they're going to shut down their crypto mining pool services in November — I think November 10th. That covers their pool savings, cloud mining, transaction accelerator-related features, including mining pool APIs and hash rates. The company attributed the closure to an ongoing review of its products and services but did not provide a specific reason.
I'll throw it out there: I think they're probably doing what other miners in the ecosystem are doing — like Marathon, Core Scientific, Riot, CleanSpark, Hut 8, and TeraWulf. What are they doing? They're pivoting. Bitcoin miners are getting into AI. They're moving things around so they can offer electricity, space, or data centres. TeraWulf even signed a 20-year Anthropic lease. If you wonder what's happening with Binance's mining pool, that's probably it.
Kraken Receives Full Market Approval
Lastly, Kraken — what I use for my altcoins. Their parent company Payward just received full market approval from a regulatory authority to expand its digital asset services and payments, building on a preliminary approval received in May. Payments, I think, is going to be the big thing.
Live Q&A
Rob: All right, let's get into the Q&A. Hey, CleanSpark — I think I still have that one. Some people in our group were talking quite heavily about CleanSpark. Digital Asset Agent says, "Yeah, Coinbase was $30 a month. I went with Kraken." I don't know why Coinbase charges so much for the same type of service. I've got more options on Kraken anyway.
As a reminder: do we leave everything on the exchanges? No, we do not. We diversify our portfolio and we diversify our storage. I'm guilty because I have some automatic buys coming in — Canton, Hyperliquid, Tron, maybe Solana, and some others, and now I'm going to have Near. Not every day do I take it all off. About once a week I'll take things off. I wish I was better at that, but I'm not.
Someone says Coinbase exhibits all the scummy bank behaviours. I'm not going to defend Coinbase, but I will say one good thing: in 2022, they didn't collapse like the other exchanges did. At least they were solvent. For that I can say thank you for not totally destroying everything.
James says, "Can Cardano be big? It's number 33. Cardano cultists love it." They do. It's more of a niche, but as far as tokenisation goes, it seems to have a nice little partnership with DTCC, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago. We'll see if it works out. I'm just waiting for some kind of altcoin run-up. There's always a little bit of a run-up here and there, and it's hard to be ahead of the next one because I'm not a trader and I don't have insider information. I'm just looking at trends and seeing which one could be the next.
Noman says, "Rob, how about Near having infinite supply?" This one is kind of like Ethereum — Ethereum essentially has infinite supply. But if you look at the tokenomics, here's the allocation: epoch rewards, small and large backers, community grants, core contributors. What people care about is the unlock schedule. The best time was right around 2021 — that's why everything blew up, because we were on a scheduled release. Right now there's a continual slight upward slope in supply, which of course means a little bit of sell pressure. The total supply is around 1.26 to 1.277 billion and so on. This schedule goes all the way out to 2030. I don't know if I'm even going to be into any of these by then. But if it goes up like we said, I really couldn't care less.
A lot of tokens have that infinity symbol. Let's look at Ethereum — total supply, max supply: infinity and beyond. BNB: max supply 200 million, but total supply is only 133 million. Why? Because of the unlock schedule. The ICO was 50%, the founding team got 40%, and angel investors got 10%. Interesting. Solana: max supply infinity. XRP: circulating supply 63 billion, total 100 billion — so there's probably a treasury releasing it every month and getting dumped on. XRP experts, tell me in the comments.
Rusty says you can check Ethereum's burn mechanism at ultrasound.money. There are two ways to look at it — you can even simulate proof of work since Ethereum used to be proof of work, just like Bitcoin. Right now the growth rate is not even a percentage per year. Over 30 days or four years since the merge, it's only been plus 0.32%. Not too bad. Even though it says infinity, it ain't that much. If we reverse that and ask what would have happened if Ethereum never went to proof of stake and stayed proof of work, the difference is 3.51% — a good amount versus proof of stake. Good one, Rusty.
Someone asks if ETH switching from proof of work to proof of stake was ETH's downfall. As far as the amount being produced, it wasn't too bad, but I liked the old way. If you want to appease the big institutions and make a nice fat ETF with a staking yield — although the American government shut that down — so here we are.
Someone says Rob's investments aren't doing too well and he can't even keep the lights on. It's true. This is why I'm also so thin — I can't even afford heat. At least my lights are solar-powered. Got to love them.
On the AI kills humanity debate: I always think to myself, what is the purpose of AI eliminating us? It's like an anthill — do I really need to eliminate every single anthill? As long as it doesn't bite me, I'm just going to let it go. I think AI will become so powerful it'll just be like, "If we step on you, we're sorry." I think that's it for the next 10 years.
Gas makes a good point: 1.6 million Solana gets released from supply every month for the next few years. People don't look at the tokenomics properties. It's true. We did look into them very heavily during the ICO craze because that's when smart people figured out: is the time frame for release very long, which sounds pretty good? Or does the distribution show that 75% goes to early investors — meaning we're just here to get dumped on? Those were the tokenomics, and they were fun.
Someone says, "Can we all wait for Bitcoin to hit magic figures? I only have five to ten years left in my life." This is the big thing — it's so important that we don't put so much time into this crypto space. People will say, "I'm never going to take profits because I'm going to give them to my kids or grandkids." You can do that. But what are your kids going to do with it? They're probably going to blow right through it because you didn't teach them to hold on to things. And then what's the whole point? They hold on to it and give it to their kids and their kids and their kids — maybe they're trillionaires at some point. But in the future, maybe we don't even need money. Maybe AI disrupts that so much. We don't know the future. So make sure we appreciate the here and now and take care of ourselves. That's the most important thing. As time goes on, it's important that we take profits, not everyone broke taking profits, and live a life — not just save, save, save. Things will be just fine.