NEAR Whale Redeploys $100 Million Into Crypto Markets After $29 Million in Profits

CRWV-Linked Contracts Shed 71% of Open Interest

A whale account that banked more than $29 million in profits from NEAR Protocol (NEAR) trades has redeployed roughly $100 million of exposure back into crypto markets. Positioning records published on Friday, 2026-10-16, tie that move to a sharper development in the tokenized-equity corner of the market: open interest on contracts linked to CoreWeave (CRWV), the AI cloud computing firm, dropped by more than 71% after Nvidia chief Jensen Huang publicly backed the company, and the whale's position adjustment counts among the reported drivers of the decline. Open interest measures the total value of derivative contracts still standing at a point in time, so a single large account unwinding tokenized US equity exposure of the kind offered through platforms such as xStocks can pull the aggregate down on its own. The profits behind this round of repositioning came from NEAR, the token of the NEAR Protocol layer-1 network, where spot momentum has been strong in its own right: our live monitoring shows the NEAR price up 12.6% over the past 24 hours. During the rebound, the account heavily adjusted the US stock-linked book it had been running and shifted the roughly $100 million of exposure into crypto assets. The sequencing matters. The CRWV-linked contracts bled open interest while the underlying stock rallied, a pattern that points to positions closed into strength rather than offloaded under pressure. Nothing in the record shows the stock itself sold off; the contrast between a rising underlying and shrinking open interest is what stands out. A 71% drawdown describes the whole market for those contracts, not one desk's contribution, and the record shows what changed on-chain without stating the intent behind each closing trade.

Huang Rules Out an Nvidia Backstop

Huang's comments set the stage for the unwind. He said CoreWeave's financial health continues to improve and its cost of raising capital keeps falling, which means financial support from Nvidia is not required. CoreWeave had been carrying market concern over high debt and the burden of financing its AI infrastructure buildout, worries that had weighed on the stock. With the company's most important GPU supplier publicly dismissing any need for a backstop, holders of CRWV-linked on-chain contracts had less reason to keep directional positions open. Two indicators should not be folded into one number. Open interest on the contracts and the stock's rebound measure different things. The whale's adjustment was cited as one of the causes of the 71% decline, but the share of the decrease attributable to that single account was not disclosed. On-chain records captured for one wallet also need to be read separately from whatever effect its trades have on prices and trading volumes.

Tokenized stock contracts track a listed equity's price on-chain, so sentiment on Wall Street and positioning in crypto markets now share a direct channel. For NEAR Protocol (NEAR) itself, the whale's $29 million in realized profits sit on a market that has been adding institutional rails. Bitwise's NEAR ETF, which rolls staking yield, expressed as APY, directly into its net asset value, logged a $3.98 million net inflow for Monday, October 12. Earlier in the week, an 11% push toward $6.00 lifted trading volume to $3.54 billion. Together, the fund flows and the whale's book describe the same condition from opposite ends: NEAR has become large enough that both a regulated ETF wrapper and a single derivatives account can move nine-figure amounts through it. The record supports a rotation reading, not a retreat. The $100 million landed where the data names it, crypto markets at large, and not in NEAR specifically, so the redeployment cannot be booked as fresh NEAR demand, and the 71% open-interest drop cannot be read as deleveraging while the same account was adding nine figures elsewhere. The unwind also shows no sign of forced liquidation, since the contracts were closed while the underlying stock rallied. The move sits on a token that already carries institutional demand, from Bitwise's fund to analyst calls like Giannis Andreou's $16 target for NEAR behind a weekly breakout above $6. What the placement rules out matters as much as what it suggests: rotation out of tokenized equities, yes; a NEAR-specific demand shock, no. Traders weighing near-term levels can follow our NEAR technical analysis coverage.