When Shift Happens Host Kevin Names NEAR Protocol His Fourth-Largest Holding

Kevin's Four Core Positions

Podcaster Kevin, the host of When Shift Happens, placed NEAR Protocol (NEAR) fourth among the positions he holds in size, telling The Lark Davis Show on October 20 that the Layer 1 blockchain protocol belongs to the trade he expects to dominate this cycle. His ordering put Hyperliquid first, Zcash second, Bitcoin third and NEAR fourth, a concentration he framed as the year's main lesson: take a small number of bets early and hold them large. Hyperliquid earned the top allocation after he hosted executive Jeff Yan in his studio almost two years ago and concluded the operation was built differently; he has bought every month since. Zcash arrived second through introductions roughly eighteen months back, when Solana's former chief marketing officer said his attention covered only two projects, Solana and Zcash. Mumtaz, known across the industry as Mert, then proposed sponsoring the Zashi Zcash wallet and took his fee in the token, and Kevin has kept accumulating on the view that the people who lifted Solana from $8 are now at work on Zcash. Bitcoin holds the third slot as an asset he says should always be owned and buys monthly; the two larger positions outrank it only because they have already returned thirty to forty times his cost. Outside the four he named Jupiter and Ethena, praising Jupiter's team for shipping product through the bear market even while the token lagged. His cycle thesis centers on roughly ten strong businesses whose tokens trade depressed while fees and revenue run large, an approach he expects to force a re-rating once the market prices it in. Kevin, a Swiss native, went from watching one of Davis's videos in 2019 to sharing a stage with CZ at Bitcoin Asia, a trajectory he traced on air, and he argued that spreading across dozens of tokens dilutes the edge a concentrated book carries.

The Zcash Hand-Off to NEAR

NEAR's place in the portfolio rests on a hand-off Kevin described in detail: the group that revived Zcash has, he said, now all moved onto NEAR Protocol, with an announcement he indicated is close to public. Mumtaz has supported the NEAR Protocol (NEAR) narrative since the token traded near 60 cents. Polosukhin, co-author of the transformer paper that underpins GPT, is due on the show shortly, an appearance Kevin flagged in advance. The Token2049 dinner last week gathered Naval and about 25 attendees, all figures around Zcash, and the message he carried out of the room was that “this is the next runner.” Zcash itself supplies the template. Davis shared a Naval tweet when the token traded near $80, after which it rose roughly twenty to twenty-five times, and both men conceded the “secret Bitcoin” story invited criticism yet became self-fulfilling as capital poured in. Kevin argued Zcash won on a simple narrative: a fixed 21 million supply removes dilution concerns, and Mumtaz's framing needs only 500,000 wealthy individuals to put three to five percent of net worth in as insurance against Bitcoin, in the same privacy lane that designs from the Mimblewimble era once occupied. Alliance's Ka Wong, he added, holds nothing outside Bitcoin and Zcash. Kevin's arithmetic: if Bitcoin reaches $200,000 this cycle and Zcash captures five percent of that framing, the token sits at $10,000, ten times today's level, and NEAR Protocol (NEAR) becomes the beta play on the privacy narrative. He sized NEAR's previous all-time high near $20 against roughly $5 today, exactly the kind of compressed altcoin valuation he says the cycle will re-rate. The caveat came attached: he has recommended nothing to anyone since Celsius, Luna and FTX collapsed in 2022, having lost money twice himself, and Davis replied that he keeps his own book to ten or eleven coins.

Flows Behind the Narrative

The endorsement lands while NEAR's tape already moves. The token has gained 11% over the past 24 hours, Helius CEO Mumtaz has joined the NEAR Foundation Council, and Bitwise's NEAR ETF has taken $80 million over three straight weeks, so the podcast case stacks on top of measurable flows. NEAR Intents cross-chain swap volume topped $130 million in 24 hours, routing trades through intent-based execution rather than a conventional bridge protocol. None of that proves the thesis Kevin laid out, but it gives the narrative numbers underneath it. The level that caps the reading is the prior record near $20, the top of NEAR's support and resistance range; a break above it would extend the setup, and until then the case stays open-ended above $5.