AI Altcoins Compared: NEAR, TAO, Render, ICP and FET Checked

Brian Armstrong, the man who runs Coinbase, summed up where this whole market is heading in a single post back in March when he wrote that AI agents can't open a bank account in traditional finance, but they can own a crypto wallet. Now, if you're holding any of the bigger coins like XRP, Solana, Cardano, or more, and you've been waiting for the banks to finally show up, that sentence should make you a little uncomfortable because it means the biggest new customer in crypto might be a bank at all. It's going to be software that spends money on its own for you. And while most people are always focused on the prices and the charts, a small group of tokens started working on the infrastructure that all of this money is going to move on. So, my research team went looking for the AI coins where you can actually follow the money.

And every coin on the short list that came back does a completely different job. So, you aren't buying the same exact bet or crypto twice. And the coin at the top of my list went up more than 150% in September alone. On September 29th, it got its first ETF in the United States, and it pulled in over $35 million on its very first day. And the company behind that fund just put out a 39-page report with a 2030 price target that's around 30 times higher than where it trades right now.

But that same report also has a much lower number in it, and you need to see it before you put a single dollar into this coin. That said, if you're here to build real wealth, protect what's yours, and be the one to change your family's future, hit the subscribe button and comment bullish below. Also, we're giving away our 2026 altcoin trading strategies and crypto yield generation brief to everyone who follows us on Instagram @bullrunners. The official link will be in the description below this video. Now, let's run it.

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What's going on Bull Runners? Welcome back to the YouTube channel. If you're new here, my name is Paul and you can find me on Twitter or X @cryptopaul. So, let's start with why AI needs crypto in the first place because an AI agent is basically an assistant that lives on your computer and has some form of reasoning and a thought process behind what they do even though they technically can't think. And you can send it off to book your flight or order your groceries or take care of a list of tasks that you don't want to do like cleaning out your email inbox.

And every one of those jobs cost money, but no bank is going to open an account for a piece of software because they require KYC. They need to know their customer because they have to get that information back to the regulator and more specifically the tax man. So, the agent keeps its money in a crypto wallet instead. You don't need KYC if an agent can use crypto. And Raoul Pal said it like this at the end of September.

He stated a weakening US dollar could give crypto the green light and help extend the industry's rally further stating that his guess is that cryptos will get more adoption over time as AI uses them.

The agentic side, yeah, we can all use AI and never need blockchain. But once you have a agent acting on your behalf, you need it. You can't do it without it.

Now, a lot of people think AI coins are a scam and honestly, they've got a point. Many people have been scammed over many years in crypto. A lot of crypto companies have put the term AI on their website, but then had no real utility or no real adoption. A AI has been the easiest story in crypto to sell for 3 years straight, and plenty of these coins are just a ticker stuck on a chatbot. However, every single coin on this list is vetted and still well below its all-time high.

So, our team not only kept the coins where you can follow the real money through fees, burns, revenue, or even potentially an SEC filing, but we also looked at the supply and the total amount of tokens that will ever be created. That way, you know exactly where the money's at and what potentially could hurt you if you're to invest. That said, if you're already holding other cryptos or tokens, none of this means you have to sell them because money in this cycle moves from one group of coins to the next, and a coin can sit still for 2 years while that happens somewhere else. So, owning a few different groups is how you stop needing one coin to be right about everything, and instead take advantage of an overall trend in growth in the crypto market. So, let's go through all five starting at the bottom.

Number five is FET, or Fetch, which rebranded its company to be called Artificial Super Intelligence Alliance. And its job in the AI economy is the agents themselves. These are the small programs that find each other, take on a task, and get paid for it. It's the biggest agent network in crypto. Its marketplace, Agentverse, had about 36,000-plus registered agents in a March count, which was the biggest share of any agent registry measured.

It also has an agent search engine called ASI One, and a cloud where agents pay for AI computing power in FET. That said, FET trades around 22 cents with a market cap of close to around $500 million, which is more than a 90% below its high of 3 and 1/2 dollars. Now, it's that far down because the whole AI coin hype from 2024 cooled off and crypto experienced a major bear market. Plus, when you combine that with a lot of internal drama in the earlier days of FET, which we'll get to in a second, coins can dump severely below those all-time highs, which can present some really good dip buying opportunities. But then back in August, it came back to life and pumped nearly 80% in a little over a month with the rest of the AI tokens.

But here is where you have to be cautious with something like FET because there is about 2.7 billion FET currently circulating or around 85% of the total supply. However, there is no hard limit written into the code by the team, which means the team can create more if they want to and have only burned so far about 5 million coins in January, which is less than 0.2% of the supply. And this isn't helped by the drama that started back in October of 2025 when Ocean Protocol, one of the three projects the alliance was built from, walked out of it completely. Now, one can only assume what was happening in those rooms, but in my personal opinion, that's usually not a good sign of a company that's well-run. And more often than not, it just becomes a bunch of finger-pointing from either company or side.

A month later, Fetch.ai sued Ocean Protocol in New York claiming Ocean converted coins that were meant for its community and sold around 263 million FET into the open market. Ocean denies it and the case is still open. So, FET is the purest bet on AI agents, but it also comes with the most question marks because the team can still create new coins, the founders keep getting coins until 2050, and it's in a lawsuit with one of its own co-founders that the project was built from. So, it's important to be wary of these facts before you own a piece of it. And in my opinion, it would probably be the smallest piece of the pie in my AI coin basket.

Now, number four has the opposite problem because the tech does work, but the coin keeps falling anyways. And number four is Internet Computer, otherwise known as ICP, and its job is AI apps. The tech did what it promised, which is running a whole app. We're talking the website, the database, the logic, and then placing all of these directly on a blockchain with no Amazon server underneath it. Most companies use AWS because it's so affordable and reliable.

This one did it on its own. But back by August 1st, the coin still hit just shy of $2, its lowest price ever. And while I'm recording this, it's back to a little over $3, but that's not much of a rally when most of the major market movers have already pumped way harder. Now, the reason it kept falling and had nothing to do with the tech is because ICP printing new coins at almost 10% a year to pay stakers and the people running its computers. And when supply grows that fast and there isn't enough demand to meet it, and the market cap is already extremely high for the amount of revenue generation they have, that doesn't help the price one bit.

This is when Dfinity, the team behind ICP, came up with a fix called Mission 70. It's a plan they published on January 13th to cut that number from 9.72% to about 2.92% by the end of this year. About 2/3 of that cut comes from paying stakers and the people running its computers less, and the rest only happens if apps burn a lot more ICP. And the app doing most of that burning is Caffeine, where you just describe the app you want, AI builds it, and it goes live without you writing a single line of code. This is pretty freaking cool.

Every app that runs there burns a little ICP as fuel. So, the more people build, the more coins get destroyed, which is good for its tokenomics. The risk, however, is that Dfinity controls the supply half of that plan, but none of the demand half. The market cap is at about $1.8 billion, and ultimately a coin that put in a new all-time low in August, still has to prove that people will pay to use it, and that demand will show up in the token itself, leading to higher prices. So, if you buy ICP, keep a small position until Mission 70 actually shows up in the numbers and on the chart.

Now, let's move on to number three, because number three sells the one thing every AI company on the planet is short of. Number three is Render, and its job is computing power. It works like Airbnb for graphics cards. People with spare graphics cards rent them out to artists and AI companies who can't get enough power anywhere else. And as you might already know, companies like Nvidia are doing extremely well because the demand for really high-powered graphics card is insane. [music] And in April, Render added 60,000 more graphics cards from a network called Salad, which is expected to bring in around 4.3 million dollars of paid work in the first year.

Every time a customer pays for a job, some render gets destroyed, but the network also creates new render every year to pay the people renting out their graphics cards. So, for the price to go up, the coins being destroyed have to catch up with the coins being created. And in 2025, around 1 million coins got destroyed, while around 5.9 million new ones were created, even though its graphics card marketplace grew 87% that year. That said, Render trades around $2.06 with a market cap nearly $1.1 billion and is down about 84% below its 2024 high of around $13.50, so usage still has a long way to grow before these coins being destroyed catch up. Now, number two has that same problem but at a much bigger scale.

Even after it went through that kind of halving Bitcoin is famous for. And number two is none other than BitTensor, otherwise known as Tao, and its job is intelligence itself. BitTensor is an open market where anyone can plug in an AI model, computing power, or data, and the network pays whoever does the job best in Tao. So, thousands of people competes to supply this AI instead of one company keeping it locked away privately, kind of like Anthropic or OpenAI. Last December, it had its first halving event, which cut new Tao from 7,200 a day to 3,600 a day.

Now, what I like about this token is that, similar to Bitcoin, the supply is truly capped at 21 million tokens. Currently, there are about 11.6 in circulation, while it trades at around $280, which is still 60% below its all-time high of over $750. And the mini markets inside it, called subnets, have started earning real money from outside customers. A count published on September 21st puts it at 28 to 35 million dollars a year across 24 subnets, led by one called Liam at 8 to 10 million. And the 14 of those subnets use that money to buy back their own coins.

Still, that revenue covers less than a tenth of around the 400 million dollars a year the network pays out in new Tao. So, BitTensor pays out more than $10 in new coins for every $1 a customer spends. And a more skeptical count could only find about 5 million dollars of outside revenue. Either way, Grayscale, a major player in the crypto space, has filed for a Tao ETF, but it hasn't been approved yet. So, the having cut the supply and whether Tao works from here depends on that revenue through its subnets growing fast enough to close the gap.

Now, number one is where AI agents actually pay for things. And since September 29th, anyone can buy it through a normal brokerage account because number one is none other than NEAR. And its job is payments. NEAR has this thing called intents, which let you or an agent working for you just say what you want, like turn this Bitcoin into Zcash. Then a group of companies compete to do it the cheapest way across different blockchains.

In September alone, intents moved about 4.8 billion dollars, and it served around 50 million dollars in fees over the past year. And since February, the protocol's own cut of every fee goes into buying NEAR off the open market, not from their private wallets where they get to sell into the open market. This is very bullish for the token itself. And since mid-August, NEAR is up nearly 230% trading at around $5 with a market cap of over 6.8 billion dollars. NEAR supply changed too.

Nearly all of the around 1.3 billion NEAR is already out there. So, there's no big unlock waiting for you, which means the token has real room to move. New coins were cut from 5% a year to 2.5% in October of 2025, and 70% of the normal network fees get burned. Even better, back on September 24th, the SEC and NYSE Arca cleared Bitwise's NEAR ETF under the ticker NRR. It started trading on September 29th, and it pulled in 35.5 million dollars on its very first day.

Bitwise's CIO Matt Hougan also put out a 39-page report with a 2030 base case of and a bull case of $560. But, the same report also has a bear case, and that one's $1.63. This is quite a major disparity between those prices, which means if this thing works out for NEAR, it seriously works. And if it doesn't, well, you stand to lose a little bit of money. Either way, you're swinging for the fences.

And in the ETF's filing, Bitwise says it plans to stake 100% of the NEAR the fund holds, so the fund earns new NEAR every day just for holding it. The risk is that the buyback everyone gets excited about only took in about 1.8 million dollars in September, which comes to around 22 million a year at that current pace. Meanwhile, we have 2.5% inflation still creating around 32 million new NEAR per year, and that's worth about $165 million at today's price. So, we would need those buybacks to seriously increase if it was going to matter at all. Or, we need demand from retail to seriously increase.

And there is one final risk you should know about. On October 1st, a hacker, probably using AI, found a bug in Intense code and pulled out about $3.8 million. The team tracked the hacker down, gave them 48 hours to send it back, and by October 4th, every dollar did get returned. So, nobody lost money this time, but it shows Intense are still new and that there are risks. Matter of fact, with any level of code in this age of AI, there are risks.

And new systems that move billions of dollars are exactly what hackers go after. After a run like that into an ETF launch, a lot of the people who got in early are going to sell to the people who showed up a bit later. So, it's important to think about that as the price rises, there is an incentive for those earlier buyers to start selling, which could create a little bit of pressure. But, my personal opinion is that NEAR is one of the best AI companies that's really going to move this bull market cycle. Now, let's talk about what you actually do with these five tokens.

NEAR is the payments bet with the strongest money behind it, and after growing over 200-plus percent through September, this is something that I would be building a base position around instead of chasing every single new local high. Tao is the intelligence bet, and the number to watch is subnet revenue closing the gap on new supply. Render is the computing power bet, and it only works if the coins being destroyed keep climbing toward the coins being created. ICP is the apps bet, and mission 70 has to show up in the real inflation number by the end of the year. And finally, FET is the agent bet with the most baggage, so in my opinion, it probably should be the smallest piece of that AI pie.

Now, it's important to note that these AI positions should probably sit next to whatever you already hold. You don't have to replace any of what you hold. Instead, maybe if you're going to dollar cost average or buy your favorite crypto token you've been buying for years this month to the tune of 100%, you set aside a portion of that to go buy some of these AI tokens, and I would weight them from near on down. You pick the total amount for the whole AI position first, then you spread it across several buys over a few weeks or even months, where a pullback can really help you out instead you out of the market. In my opinion, because we're starting a new bull market, there's no need to worry or rush or take on any major leverage because you can get stopped out, and that's no fun when you're losing a bunch of your money at the start of a new bull market.

Your goal should be to build strong positions that you plan to hold through the rest of the market. Still, it's important to note that some of these tokens aren't going to move as much as the others. You don't want to over-rotate, you don't want to chase, you just want to build a core position with conviction waiting from the best to the worst. That way, you're always in the right one at the right time when it moves, and you don't miss out on anything. Because many people make the wrong decisions when they feel FOMO.

Now, this is the type of stuff that our research team teaches and shows you exactly how to do inside of our private intelligence network. Every week, they dig through coins just like the five that I mentioned, they follow the money and the unlocks and the filings and do all of the heavy lifting and the hard work for you and then they give you the full breakdown in a very simple format that's easy to digest. And by the way, you get access to all of this information before the majority of the crypto market hears about it. We truly have the inside scoop because of many of our current team members and experts used to work at the companies that we're sharing with you. And they know all of the inside juice and information.

Now, back in June when NEAR was at around $2, we were putting out a video on this channel covering exactly why NEAR was so great. And since then, NEAR has not only doubled but gone up over 250% off those lows.

NEAR is one of the few where the utility is actually proven, you know, real products, real users, a founder who genuinely helped build modern-day AI. So, it's one of the most interesting projects to keep on your watchlist right now.

And some of our members went even bigger on it like Albert who is up over $6,500 on his NEAR in September. Now, these results, of course, aren't typical so don't be typical. You should always do your own research and consult with a financial advisor or a professional if anything is freaking you out or you're not too sure. But on top of the picks you get, you do get live coaching every week on when to buy and when to take profit, a full training on keeping your crypto safe in your own wallet. I know we've been hearing about a lot of hacks surrounding cold storage wallets.

And we also show members how to put what they already hold to work to earn yield. So, instead of letting your crypto sit completely idle, you could actually be earning for sitting on it. Now, every member gets personal help with their own portfolio so we only take on a few people per month. And if you're serious about this, all you need to do is click on the very first link down in the description below. Or if you're on a mobile device like a cell phone or potentially even an iPad, then you can click the three little dots below this video for more and you'll find the very first link that takes you exactly where you need to go to book a call with our team.

It's absolutely free. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We guarantee you're going to walk away with a heck of a lot more clarity either way. And if you're not the right fit, it's no worries. But if you are, this could absolutely change the game for you when it comes to investing in crypto.

That said, that is it for the video, folks. If you enjoyed it, be sure to subscribe to the channel. As always, stay bullish and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.

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