Bitwise Buried Its Dogecoin ETF and Is Now Chasing AI Agents

Hunter Horsley has a blunt explanation for why Bitwise's Dogecoin ETF flopped: the people who buy ETFs were never the people who buy memecoins.

The Bitwise Dogecoin ETF (BWOW) listed on the NYSE in November 2025, and buyers never showed up in force. Its last day of trading is set for Oct. 14, with liquidation following on Oct. 22 — shareholders still in the fund receive their net asset value as of Oct. 21 in cash, and nobody has to do anything to get it.

The two audiences that never met

Speaking at a conference in Asia, Horsley said the shutdown exposed a "delta" between ETF buyers and users of crypto brokerage apps. ETF investors simply did not want to put money into Dogecoin, he argued, though he thinks that could change later. The numbers back him up: Dogecoin funds recorded about $318,000 in net inflows last month, a small reversal of July's outflows, and have accumulated roughly $300 million in trading volume.

From memecoins to AI agents

Bitwise is already pointing its lineup elsewhere. On Sept. 29 it launched the NEAR ETF (NRR) on NYSE Arca, the first US spot product giving direct exposure to NEAR, charging a 0.75% fee and staking the holdings in-house so the rewards accrue to the fund's net asset value. NEAR's hook for this pitch is NEAR Intents, which lets a user or an AI agent move assets across chains without sending coins through a bridge first.

Horsley describes crypto and AI as "cut from the same cloth" — one rebuilds financial services as software, the other lets a machine do tasks a person used to do. When AI agents start transacting, he expects their preferred rails to look less like a bank teller behind a pane of glass and more like a smart contract available in milliseconds. The firm has filed for two AI-flavored ETFs, an AI Cyber Defense fund in August and an AI Bond fund in September.

Why this matters

For anyone holding altcoin ETF positions, the lesson is uncomfortable: a viral ticker and a loud community do not convert into ETF inflows. Dogecoin's roughly $300 million in ETF trading volume is dwarfed by other altcoin funds, and it was not enough to keep a product alive. Bitwise's answer is to stop chasing retail memecoin demand and start building for software that trades on its own.